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The cost of dying

ANDREW FLEMING
The fee for burial at Mountain View Cemetery will go
up significantly next year, but cemetery manager Glenn
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BY

16 I

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in this issue

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011 THE VANCOUVER COURIER

MIKE HOWELL
Vancouver’s police chief says the cost of monitoring the Occupy
Vancouver protest may put the police department over budget this year.
BY

List mania

BY BOB MACKIN
A dozen hopefuls for mayor and 41 for council are on the final list of
candidates for the Nov. 19 civic election.

O P I N I O N

8I

House of cards

BY ALLEN GARR
Neither Gregor Robertson nor Suzanne Anton should be surprised that
most of the tenants in provincial housing projects were not homeless.

D I N I N G

Greece is the word

BY TIM PAWSEY
Forget Retsina, today’s Greek wines are refreshingly light on the
palate and wallet.

28
Web Exclusives@vancourier.com
Video: Robertson vs. Anton

Halloween

Video of our mayoral debate between the NPA and Vision
Vancouver contenders will be online Oct. 24.

Video: Candid Candidates

BY NAOIBH O’CONNOR
Find out what council candidates from the NPA, COPE and Vision
think of Vancouver’s controversial bike lanes.

ayor Gregor Robertson ambles into his
ofﬁce, leaves a cup of what’s left of his
green tea on a desk and eases himself into a
chair at a boardroom-sized table.
He apologizes for being late.
Robertson has just come from a meeting
with Police Chief Jim Chu to discuss the
city’s strategy for monitoring the large crowd
expected at the “Occupy Vancouver” protest
outside the Vancouver Art Gallery.
“It’s been a lot of work this week and it’s
proving to be challenging because this job
doesn’t stop for an election,” Robertson says
the day before the peaceful gathering began.
The preparation for the protest came during “homelessness action week,” which saw
the mayor make several public appearances
and talk about his three-year-old promise to
end “street homelessness” by 2015. Lots of
camera time, lots of interviews. The exposure
was fortuitous for an incumbent mayor seeking re-election in November’s civic vote. The
fact more homeless people are off the streets

than when Robertson took ofﬁce in 2008
played well in the media’s coverage.
But on the day he spoke to the Courier, the
news on the homelessness front took a disappointing turn for Robertson as he learned
only a small percentage of homeless people
were offered suites in four new social housing
buildings. Not exactly good timing for a mayor who assumed the four buildings and 10

others to be built on city-owned sites would
ﬁrst open their doors to homeless people.
The NPA’s Suzanne Anton, who is Robertson’s main challenger in the Nov. 19 election,
immediately pounced on the city staff report
that revealed only 37 per cent of tenants in
four of the ﬁrst 14 buildings were previously
homeless.
How, Anton asked, could this have hap-

pg 4
ﬁnal
(colour)

pened on Robertson’s watch?
The mayor offered a long explanation,
using the words surprised and concerned
to convey his disappointment—and, more
pointedly, that he is constrained by what is a
fact in the business of constructing and managing social housing in B.C. “The province is
ultimately calling these shots,” he says. “You
just have to keep pushing harder, that’s what
it comes down to.”
And no, he adds, the timing of the news
so close to an election is not worrisome.
“Just because it’s an election doesn’t mean
we don’t back off on being transparent with
the numbers and the truth. We want to know
what the situation is regardless of the political landscape and we want to take action to
remedy it if it’s a big problem.”
Transparency has been a go-to word for
Robertson during his three years in ofﬁce
but it’s one critics of separated bike lanes,
shelters and proposed rental towers say they
haven’t seen from the mayor and his ruling
Vision Vancouver council.
Prominent business associations, including the Vancouver Board of Trade, criticized council’s lack of consultation before
implementing the Hornby and Dunsmuir
bike lanes. Residents living near shelters at
the north end of the Granville Street Bridge
launched the same criticism at the mayor
and complained of drug activity and public
disorder outside their high-priced condos.
Continued on page 5

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011 THE VANCOUVER COURIER

A5

cover

Political scientist says voter turnout will be key to Vision victory
Continued from page 4
Then a group in the West End collected
almost 10,000 signatures opposing Vision’s
proposal to have developers build highrise
rental towers without ﬁrst establishing a
comprehensive plan for the neighbourhood.
The mayor nods, acknowledging the
criticism. “Well, certainly we could have
done better in some of our actions in consulting citizens but in other cases I think
we’ve done an exceptional job,” he says,
referring to the city’s “Talk green to us
campaign” that attracted 35,000 people.
And here’s the other point, the mayor
says: Much of what Vision implemented
over the past three years was either promised or laid out in the party’s 2008 platform, from opening shelters to separated
bike lanes and a so-called green grant program.
Still, nearly 50,000 people who live
mostly on the West Side of the city chose
to vote in 2008 for then-NPA mayoral candidate Peter Ladner. And many of those
voters are likely behind Anton as she continues to attack what she calls Robertson’s
“goofy agenda” of allowing backyard
chickens and doling out grants for people
to grow wheat in their front yards.
For Robertson, he says Anton’s campaign is not providing context to a bold
agenda that he still believes resonates
with citizens and will carry him and his
council to another victory next month.
“We’ve had a decade of chaos at city
hall before we were elected in 2008,” he
says. “I’m the ﬁrst mayor to run for reelection in 12 years and we ﬁnally have a
very stable and experienced council that

Robertson (left) helped open the Dunsmuir and Hornby street bike lanes, which
were criticized by business associations.
photo Dan Toulgoet
are focused on what people care about.
So I think we’re on the right track. We’ve
just got to get the word out and make sure
people come out to vote.”

G

etting the vote out could be Robertson’s biggest challenge, according to
Terri Evans, a Simon Fraser University political science instructor who manages the
urban studies program.
Unlike Vision’s 2008 campaign, which
saw more than 15,000 new members join

the party and Robertson challenge Raymond Louie to lead Vision, there is little
buzz in the city for an overhaul of the current administration.
With various polls released this year
showing respondents generally support
Robertson and Vision, the worry for Vision
has to be a content and apathetic electorate that may not show up on voting day,
Evans says. “That may be where their
election challenge is,” she says. “It will be
important for them to get their vote out,

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especially because their vote is split across
variations of the left. They’ll need to put
the same kind of attention into those recruitment efforts that proved to be so fruitful last campaign.”
Historically, the NPA has gotten its vote
out and is working to raise $2.5 million
in what could be one of the party’s most
expensive campaigns this decade. But will
Anton’s continued attacks on bike lanes,
chickens, wheat ﬁelds and blaming the
Stanley Cup riot on Robertson sway voters
to her camp?
How about the Olympic Village saga,
where there is still uncertainty whether
taxpayers will be on the hook for up to
$100 million? Will the tag that Robertson
is a bike-loving green radical who only appeases special interest groups stick?
Evans believes voters will zero in on
Robertson’s promise to decrease homelessness. His number one campaign priority in
2008 was ending homelessness by 2015.
It’s a phrase he uttered many times early
on in his term but now uses “street homelessness,” as he did at the ofﬁcial opening
of Karis Place social housing complex last
week. His advisors explain Robertson was
always focused on ending street homelessness, as is printed in the party’s 2008 campaign platform. It’s just that sometimes the
mayor inadvertently forgets to use street as
an adjective.
It may seem a subtle difference but not
when campaigning for re-election and overall homelessness increased in the city from
1,580 in 2008 to 1,605 this year, according
to Metro Vancouver homeless counts.
Continued on page 6

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Continued from page 5
The information Robertson chose to
pull from the Metro Vancouver statistics is that 670 people found shelter
between 2008 and 2011 for a decrease
in street homelessness of 82 per cent.
While the mayor can take credit for
driving the agenda to get temporary
and year-round shelters operating
in the city, he knows their openings
hinged on several million dollars from
the provincial government. That, and
a good relationship with Housing
Minister Rich Coleman—a relationship the NPA predicted would sour at
city hall once Robertson and his centre-left Vision team took ofﬁce.
That hasn’t been the case.
Coleman announced funding for
Robertson’s so-called HEAT shelters
soon after the mayor’s inauguration in
December 2008. The provincial government also announced more than
$300 million to build the 14 social
housing buildings on city properties.
But has it all been Robertson’s cajoling of Coleman that did this?
The facts are Larry Campbell as
mayor between 2002 and 2005 laid
the groundwork for a homeless action
plan. Sam Sullivan’s government followed up from 2005 to 2008 and identiﬁed at least 12 of the 14 city sites for
social housing.
Robertson argues it was his government that negotiated the funding
for the 14 sites, although Anton believes the money was coming anyway.
But, according to Coleman, it really

Housing Minister Rich Coleman (left) says Mayor Gregor Robertson’s
photo Dan Toulgoet
commitment to housing helps foster cooperation.
does matter who is in the mayor’s
chair—that the provincial government
doesn’t dole out cash to municipalities
regardless of who is leading city hall.
“It matters if somebody were to decide that they weren’t going to do the
relationship where they’ll put up land
and forgive development cost charges
in the future because that would affect
future investments by governments,”
he said, referring to the city contributing $120 million worth of land for
the 14 social housing buildings. “I
think everybody can take credit but

pg 6
ﬁnal
(colour)

I’d like to say the biggest piece is us.
But would it have been successful if
we didn’t have a cooperative government? Probably not.”
Since Robertson took ofﬁce, a total
of 1,056 new units of social/affordable housing opened in Vancouver,
according to the city’s communications department. They include 252
units at the Olympic Village, 200 at
Woodward’s and more than 300 units
spread over the ﬁrst four of 14 buildings built on city sites.
Continued on page 7

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011 THE VANCOUVER COURIER

A7

cover

Statistics note bicycle trip increase on separated bike lane network

Continued from page 6
Others are the 92-unit Lux on East Hastings, the 87-unit Kindred Place on Richards
Street and 37 units at the Union Gospel
Mission in the Downtown Eastside. The
provincial government funded all but the
Olympic Village units, which are cityowned.
Though Robertson understands housing
is a provincial responsibility, his council
has tried to get rental housing built without relying on funding from Victoria.
Under the Short Term Incentives for
Rental Program, or STIR, the city has convinced some developers to build affordable
rental housing in return for incentives such
as waiving development cost charges and
allowing for increased density.
So far, nothing has been built but three
projects, for a total of 347 units, are under construction at 1142 Granville St., 3522
Porter St. and 1215 Bidwell St. Another 661
units are in the pipeline at city hall.
The projected rents, which some housing critics argue are not affordable, will
range from $780 at the Granville building
to $1,800 per month at the Porter complex.
The Bidwell tower is expected to fetch rents
of $975 per month.
Tom Durning, a spokesperson for Tenant
Resource and Advisory Centre, says his recent research shows an average one-bedroom apartment in the West End goes for
more than $1,100 per month. So, he says,
$975 per month sounds reasonable.
“The thing about rental housing is that
it’s almost impossible to do in Vancouver
because of the cost of land,” says Durning, noting it wasn’t until Larry Campbell

was elected mayor in 2002 when secondary suites were legalized. “I’m not saying
I’m for or against the STIR program but
how else are we going to get rental housing
built if we don’t give the developer some
incentive?”
Adds Durning: “I realize some communities have some concerns, but I think the
concerns are more that they don’t want big
towers in their neighbourhoods. I don’t
want to start a ﬁght with anybody, but we
need rental housing.”

F

ollowing close behind Robertson’s
housing agenda is his drive to make
the city more environmentally friendly via
separated bike lanes, the creation of socalled green jobs and providing local food
options for residents. This is where he collides head-on with Anton.
Some background: Anton, an avid cyclist, voted for the most controversial link
of the separated bike lane network on
Hornby Street, only to attempt to rescind
her vote the next day after concluding the
council meeting was a mere formality—political theatre, she called it.
City statistics show bicycle trips have increased signiﬁcantly along Hornby Street
and the rest of the separated lane network,
which runs over the Burrard Bridge, along
Hornby to Dunsmuir and across the Dunsmuir viaduct to Chinatown.
While Robertson agrees some businesses
are upset with the lanes—but he knows
none that have gone bankrupt as Anton
suggested—he makes no apologies for implementing a change to the city’s road system that he believes is crucial to the city’s

Providing Home Renovations in Vancouver, BC since 1989!

NPA Coun. Suzanne Anton
future. “Many of the debates in Vancouver end up very inwardly focused and we
don’t look outward at the world and see
what other cities have done,” he says. “The
bike lanes are an example of that, where
people don’t know this is happening in
all the world’s greatest cities. It’s the only
way that you can intensify the activity in
a downtown without more congestion and
pollution.”
To the chickens: As of June 2010, residents have been allowed to keep backyard
hens. So far, 55 households are registered
with the program. And according to the
city, there have been no costs associated
to the initiative; the $20,000 allocated for
a so-called shelter for abandoned chickens hasn’t been spent because the city has
successfully relocated chickens to hobby
farms.
As for the “lawns to loaves” project that

Anton has criticized, Robertson sees merit in giving $5,000 to the Environmental
Youth Alliance to promote growing wheat
on 30 lawns. “All of us are conscious of
how are tax dollars are being spent, particularly with a recession and people feeling the pinch on affordability,” he says. “So
it is easy to raise a stink about an issue of
spending that might sound ‘goofy’ to some.
But I think food is an important issue in
our city.”
Food options are central in the 162-page
Greenest Action Plan that had Anton asking why no costs were associated to an
ambitious agenda applauded by various
environmental groups when the plan was
approved in July. “It’s a long term plan that
will have many actions that will come back
to council for approval,” the mayor says.
“The cost of any individual action will be
clear when those decisions are made. The
plan is setting a course and goals and metrics to achieve that. It’s not a detailed to-do
list with a budget attached.”
So, do you believe him—do you believe
in him?
Or is Robertson really a bicycle-riding
radical bent on a green agenda, no matter
what the cost to budgets, neighbourhoods
and the city’s economy?
“We’re elected at large in this city and
we work hard to represent the whole city
and its long-term interests,” Robertson
says. “Sometimes there’s short-term pain
for long-term gain and our decisions are
tough. That’s the reality of governing.”
The election is Nov. 19.
mhowell@vancourier.com
Twitter: @Howellings

WEB POLL
NATION
Go to www.vancourier.com to vote
Which are you most excited about:
A) The civic election
B) Occupy Vancouver
C) The NHL season
Last week’s poll question:
The Wall Street-inspired protests around
the world are:

A) the start of genuine political change —46
per cent
B) a blip on the screen—42 per cent
C) a conspiracy against capitalism—12 per
cent
This is not a scientific poll.

If you’re confused about all the churn in the
media about who is being housed in the new
social housing sites in Vancouver, I can help.
The Courier broke the story last week about
this issue when a city staff report entitled “Tenanting Update on the 14 Social/Supportive Housing Sites” was posted on the city’s website.
Vision Coun. Kerry Jang requested the report. He received reports that the new buildings, built on land donated by the city using
provincial dollars for construction and operating funds, were not only housing the homeless. In fact, it was far from it.
Essentially, the report noted that of the 388
newly completed supportive housing units built
on four of the 14 sites, only slightly more than
one third has been allocated to the homeless.
But before the council committee could
meet to discuss the report Thursday, stories
appeared ﬁrst in the Courier and elsewhere
recording reactions. The bluntest of headlines appeared in The Vancouver Sun Monday:
“Homeless get short straw in housing allocation: Unit meant for street people go to convicts, addicts.”
Mayor Gregor Robertson told Courier reporter Mike Howell he was “surprised” by the
revelations in the report. He told the Globe
and Mail: “I am very concerned if we are not
housing 100 per cent of the units with people
who are homeless.” Then he said the decision
about who goes into those units is made by
B.C. Housing, not the city.
His opponent in next month’s municipal
election, the NPA’s Suzanne Anton, ﬁrst raised

allengarr
the same concern: “Why are people coming out of correctional facilities being placed
ahead of Vancouver’s vulnerable homeless
population?”
Then, not surprisingly, Anton used the opportunity to attack Robertson calling his plans
to reduce street homelessness a “sham.”
On Tuesday she said: “This is Gregor’s pattern, point to other people and say it is their
fault.” And she added: “The buck stops at his
desk, and if he can’t take responsibility for
his number one issue, then it is time to step
aside pal.”
And what did the province have to say? Well,
Housing Minister Rich Coleman stepped up to
tell us that the way those buildings were being
populated was in accordance with the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by
B.C. and the city regarding all 14 sites back in
2007 when, incidentally, Anton was on coun-

ﬁnal
New Books at p08
Online
Prices

cil and her NPA party held the majority.
So, who is right? Well, as it turns out, Robertson was right and Anton was wrong about
where the “buck stops” on the issue of who
gets to live in those units. That decision is not
made by the city. B.C. Housing and contractors they hire to run the buildings make it.
But both Robertson and Anton were wrong
on the question of who gets to live in those
units.
Robertson shouldn’t have been “surprised”
and Anton shouldn’t have questioned why
people coming out of correctional institutions
are being placed “ahead of Vancouver’s vulnerable homeless population.” As she should
know from her time as a prosecutor, homeless
people often end up in the slammer and have
nowhere to go when they get out.
Both Robertson and Anton should have read
the MOU before sounding off. They would
have seen, as we were reminded this week by
the city’s former director of housing and an architect of that MOU, Cameron Gray, the buildings’ tenants would include “low income
singles living in the City’s SROs, homeless individuals and those at risk of homelessness,
many of whom are mentally ill and /or suffering from addiction and need supports.”
The province isn’t entirely without fault.
In spite of the MOU, B.C. Housing confuses
matters when it cites Coleman, as it did in a
December 2009 press release, announcing the
latest supportive housing project’s 129 units
would be “for people who are homeless.”
agarr@vancourier.com.

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letters

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011 THE VANCOUVER COURIER

opinion
DISSENT STILL LARGELY UNTAPPED

Non-violence the power
and point of OWS protests
It would have been an interesting
view of Earth from orbit last Saturday. As the line between light and
darkness crept across the globe,
city squares and plazas began to
fill with people waving signs and
banners. As the light’s boundary
crossed the Pacific, the residents
of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Manila,
Seoul and Johannesburg filtered
into the streets. The light crossed
Europe, setting off breakfasts like
a line of firecrackers, with Zurich,
Frankfurt and London joining in.
By the afternoon, an estimated
20,000 occupiers were in the
streets in Lisbon and 100,000 in
Rome. In the Americas, more folks
rose and stretched in Los Angeles,
Philadelphia, Toronto, Santiago
and dozens of other major cities,
with plans to hit the streets.
In hundreds of cities in dozens of nations, people were
rising up in both senses of the
word, in solidarity with Occupy
Wall Street.
The “We Are the 99 Percent”
meme captured the global
imagination, resulting in the
most widely distributed mass
demonstration in history. On
Saturday, more than 5,000
people packed the Vancouver
Art Gallery grounds. The mood
was festive, the speakers articulate and impassioned.
Seniors, boomers, Gen-Xers
and kids marched through the
downtown core, some in masks
and costumes, waving signs.
The decentralized occupy
movement isn’t communicating
through PR firms or PowerPoint
presentations. Non-violent occupation is the power and the
point. Not that Occupy Vancouver is without a manifesto.
There’s one at its website, which
begins, “We, the Ninety-Nine
Percent, come together with our
diverse experiences to transform
the unequal, unfair, and growing
disparity in the distribution of
power and wealth in our city and
around the globe…” Opposition
to institutionalized greed and
corruption makes for a pretty big
tent, policy-wise.
I returned to Occupy Vancouver on Sunday evening. Beyond
the tents staked at the Art Gallery grounds there was a rickety media centre, a “People’s
library,” a medical station, and
a kitchen operated by Food Not
Bombs. A discussion board listed upcoming teach-ins on monetary policy and other issues.
Three cheery women, bundled
up against the cold, were handing out slices of “Occu-pie.”
Like their contemporaries
in New York’s Zucotti Park, the
occupiers of the Art Gallery
grounds have no interest in
leaders. They’re not looking for
a Moses figure to lead them
to the Promised Land. They’ve
seen that movie before and they

letter of the week

geoffolson
know how it ends. Hence their
protocols for transparency, consensus, and rotating facilitation.
We’ve taught our children well.
Many have learned that past the
civic level, electoral politics only
tinkers around the edges of a
fundamentally flawed system.
So a new generation is drawing
on new media and street-level
connecting in search of a better
model. In the process, they are
building real-world community
and social capital.
The occupy movement has
little in common with gardenvariety street protest, or the Flat
Earth plane of party politics.
It’s added a third dimension of
public dialogue. Jessie Rockley,
28, has been camping out at
the art gallery since Friday night.
“The general assembly meetings
every day at noon and seven
are so interesting. It’s definitely
worth coming down and giving
it a listen… all the conversations
that have been building are
conversations that are going on
all around the world. And we’re
really feeling that sense of community and sense of unity.”
On a sunny Tuesday afternoon,
the participation at Occupy Vancouver appeared low, with a
small group of about 75 people
sitting for a general assembly.
The Oct. 15 day of action had far
bigger numbers than the present
scene, at least in this city. No
“Arab Spring” here.
I never expected the Occupy
movement would take off on
Canada’s West Coast as it has
in the U.S. The pain hasn’t hit
us hard enough yet. The numbers of campers on the art
gallery grounds may decline
further with the winter cold, but
the Occupy template has now
been beta-tested on a global
scale. No one knows what
comes next, but people around
the world who participated in
the Oct. 15 day of action have
connected the dots and broken
the spell. The vast majority of
them are not camped out, having returned to their jobs and
families, but they support the
cause. The potential energy of
democratic dissent is still largely untapped among the 99 per
cent, like household current.
www.geoffolson.com

One reader cites statistics to prove that declining enrolment in Vancouver schools is not due to
families ﬂeeing to the ’burbs, but to kids going to private school.
file photo Dan Toulgoet
To the editor:
Re: “Class Notes,” Oct. 14.
It is demonstrably untrue that declining
enrolment in the Vancouver school district
is caused by “families ﬂeeing to the suburbs
due to high housing costs” as is speculated
every time the VSB reports a further drop
in enrolment. A quick search of the Statistics B.C. website shows that the number of
school-aged children living in Vancouver actually increased by 5,375 to a total of 71,412
during the period from 2000 to 2010. During
this same time period, the number of children
enrolled with the VSB steadily decreased by
4,291 students to a total of 51,901. VSB enrolment decreased even in years such as 2009
and 2010 when the number of children in the
city increased markedly.
As these data show, the real reason VSB
enrolment is declining is because a diminish-

ing percentage of Vancouver’s school children are enrolled in VSB schools—from 88
per cent in 2000 to just 73 per cent in 2010.
The other 27 per cent of Vancouver’s children must be attending private schools (with
a minority being home-schooled). In spite of
our infamous high-housing costs, more Vancouver parents each year are concluding that
they must pay for a private school education
for their children. Clearly something is seen
to be wrong with public education.
The enrolment numbers indicate a crisis of
faith in public schools that should be of concern
to all right-thinking British Columbians.
We are slipping into a two-tier education
system. Is this the way we want education
to be? Is this acceptable to us? Public debate on
the issue seems to be entirely missing.

We
Occupiers deliver absurd messages want

To the editor:
Re: “Occupy Vancouver
demonstration gains momentum online,” Oct. 14.
Martin Luther King Jr.
clearly articulated the Civil
Rights protest: that America’s
promise to its citizens, rooted
in the U.S. Constitution, was
not being fulﬁlled for blacks.
King articulated that laws
needed to be enforced to ensure equality and new laws
needed to be created to that
same end. King never advocated violence. Violence
would have obscured his
message. In addition, violence could have then been
seen as the real purpose of
the protest. Now to the Oc-

Julee Kaye,
Vancouver

cupiers. Their messages,
muddled and confused,
are borne out of envy. One
message, “End Corporate
Greed” is absurd. First off,
are Occupiers implying that
all corporations are greedy?
How can a logical person
ever say that?
It’s also absurd because it
demands that a corporation
from the mom and pop shop
to the biggest businesses
ceases to do what it is intended to do: make money.
What’s really behind the
“End Corporate Greed” cry
is this: “I’m too lazy to do
what you did to be successful so I want what you have
and want you to give it to

me.” Since when in history
has it been promised that all
will have the same amount
of everything? As good stewards of their message, will
the Occupiers be the ﬁrst to
give away what they have to
those with less?
I assume that with the Occupiers, it will be more of
the same dull message with
the usual cast of clowns who
just must belong to the newest thing. Unless the message
is as clear as King’s was and
the behaviour as focused as
King’s followers, it’s just another train wreck that will
keep getting bigger.
Tony Alcantar,
Vancouver

Anton’s PPP streetcar idea a dud

To the editor:
Re: “Anton’s mission,” Oct. 12.
Suzanne Anton’s advocacy of a Public-Private Partnership to ﬁnance a streetcar needs
a reality check. In his foreword to the Transport for London 2011 budget, Peter Hendy,
Transport for London Commissioner, wrote:
“Now that we have freed London from the
scandalously costly, disruptive and wasteful Tube Public Private Partnership (PPP),
we will move forward with the programme
more effectively and at reduced cost and

disruption to passengers. In particular, we
will complete the Jubilee line upgrade, having quickly got to grips with the mess left by
the PPP arrangements.”
PPP schemes in transportation haven’t exactly been a roaring success in the UK and other
parts of the world, including Vancouver’s Canada Line, especially for the public partner that
ends up paying more than if it had ﬁnanced
and built the whole project itself.
Jean-Louis Brussac,
Coquitlam

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Class Notes

with

Naoibh O’Connor

Campaign news

The Vancouver Elementary
School Teachers’ Association
endorsed the Vision/COPE
trustee slate Tuesday.
Patti Bacchus, Mike Lombardi, Ken Clement, Cherie
Payne and Rob Wynen are
running for Vision, while
Jane Bouey, Allan Wong, Al
Blakey and Gwen Giesbrecht
are running for COPE.
VESTA asked school board
candidates to respond to an
eight-point questionnaire before the association decided
which candidates to back.
Questions included: How
will you, as a school trustee,
engage in public advocacy
for public education? How
do you feel about the current
structures used by the VSB
to seek input from its stakeholder groups? What are your
thoughts about large scale
standardized tests such as
the Foundation Skills Assessment? What is your commitment to helping keep neigh-

bourhood schools open?; and
What would you identify as
the biggest issues facing education in Vancouver?
Answers are posted on
VESTA’s website.
VESTA president Chris
Harris told the Courier the
decisions about endorsement
were made at a general meeting and he believes teachers
opted to support the COPE/
Vision slate because of their
record in Vancouver.
In a press release, Harris
stated: “It is important that
school trustees are strong
advocates for the public education system. COPE and
Vision trustees have spoken
together with one voice on
the need for adequate funding. Every student deserves
the supports and resources
required to be successful.
Teachers see the best chance
for a progressive school
board in electing COPE and
Vision candidates.”
NPA candidates didn’t respond to the union’s questionnaire. VESTA hasn’t endorsed NPA candidates in the
past. Louise Boutin, a Green
Party of Vancouver trustee
candidate, answered the association’s questions, but didn’t
get an endorsement. Andrea
Reimer, now a Vision Vancouver city councillor, is the only
Green candidate ever elected

to the school board. Boutin
said she’d hoped to get an endorsement from the teachers,
but didn’t expect to.
“We’re working towards
getting more recognition with
them. At this time I’m obviously a new candidate and I
expect to win some of them
over during the campaign.
Their allegiance has been
there for a good while so it’s
always a challenge to get some
changes made,” she said.
“But that’s what the Green
Party wants to do. It’s our ﬁrst
run at it in a while. We were
joined with COPE and Vision
before, so we have to be patient I guess. Like I said, on
the campaign trail I will deﬁnitely work at winning some
of them over because they
don’t all vote as one.”
Twenty candidates are vying for the school board’s
nine seats in the municipal
election. Along with the Vision, COPE and Green candidates, Ken Denike, Sophia
Woo, Fraser Ballantyne,
Stacy Robertson and Sandy
Sharma are running for the
NPA. Independent candidates include Lily Harvey, Peter Raymond Haskell, Misha
Lauenstein, Bang Nguyen
and Robert Allan Stark. The
vote is Nov. 19.
noconnor@vancourier.com
Twitter: @Naoibh

Former housing director says
projects not just for homeless
Mike Howell

Staff writer

The city’s former housing director has written a letter to Mayor Gregor Robertson to
“correct a major misunderstanding” in a report that went to council Thursday, which
revealed only 37 per cent of tenants living
in four social housing buildings were previously homeless.
Cameron Gray said the city’s report has
taken a narrow focus on what was a much
broader agreement between the city and provincial government related to the construction of 14 social housing buildings on city
property.
Gray authored the memorandum of understanding between the city and the province in
2007 and pointed out the 14 buildings were
built to accommodate people from the street,
single-room occupancy hotels, hospitals and
those at risk of homelessness.
“And any renter paying more than 50 per
cent of their gross income on rent is considered to be at risk of homelessness which is
why core-need singles are eligible tenants of
the 14 projects and occupancy is not limited
to those with no or very low incomes, such
as the homeless,” wrote Gray, whose letter
was circulated Tuesday by B.C. Housing, the
housing arm of the provincial government.
Four of the 14 buildings have opened and
the city’s report said only 144 of 388 tenants
were homeless before being offered a place
to live at 1005 Station St., 337 West Pender
St., 525 Abbott St. and 1338 Seymour St.
The majority of tenants—167—were living in single-room occupancy hotels prior to
their moves. Another 47 were in hospital, jail
or a treatment facility and 29 came from a
long-term care facility or other housing.
Robertson told the Courier last Friday that
he was “surprised” and “concerned” by the

low number of homeless living in the four
buildings. The mayor said he planned speak to
Housing Minister Rich Coleman and “ensure
the taxpayer investment in those sites is respected by homeless people getting housed.”
The city report acknowledged the memorandum of understanding between the city
and the province but said the focus of the
city’s efforts “has been to ensure as many
of Vancouver’s homeless get housed in the
14 sites and have access to supports,” wrote
Brenda Prosken, the city’s deputy general
manager of community services.
But Gray said the city’s report should
applaud the success of the partnership in
achieving the memorandum of understanding’s aspirations instead of lamenting that
only 37 per cent of tenants in the four buildings were previously homeless.
“It is understandable that the current
council with its focus on ending street homelessness might prefer that the 14 projects accommodate more actual homeless than they
probably will,” he said. “However, that does
not mean that B.C. Housing broke any promises, reneged on any commitments made in
the [memorandum of understanding], need
explain or apologize.”
Added Gray: “The partnership with B.C.
Housing is achieving exactly what was intended. This council may seek to reopen the
[memorandum of understanding] to narrow
its focus from housing those at risk of homelessness and those living in [single-room occupancy hotels], as well as those who are
homeless, to only housing the homeless,
which is its right, but it should be done explicitly, with B.C. Housing’s agreement, and
council needs to realize it is late in the process and there could be design, program and
ﬁnancial consequences.”
mhowell@vancourier.com
Twitter: @Howellings

pg 12
ﬁnal

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CONNECT WITH
JOYCE MURRAY MP for Vancouver Quadra
& SUPPORT LOCAL FARMERS
Joyce will be attending Kits Farmer’s Market (Kits Community
Centre parking lot) on October 23, 2011 from 12:00 to 2pm.

Cheryl Rossi
Staff writer
In advance of a forecasted freezing winter and the November municipal election, Vision Vancouver and COPE vow
to make funding for a women’s shelter
in the Downtown Eastside a top priority.
The move echoes COPE Coun. Ellen
Woodsworth’s motion, passed unanimously by council in March, to create
an additional 24-hour women’s-only
shelter and to make sure mixed-gender shelters are made safer for women. Woodsworth had called for the
creation of such a shelter to be the
city’s highest priority in the spring.
But an amendment, opposed by COPE
Coun. David Cadman and Woodsworth, made the creation of such a
shelter “a continued high priority.”
Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and NPA Coun. Suzanne Anton
were absent for the vote.
Woodsworth hopes the attention
being paid to the Missing Women
Commission of Inquiry will secure a
ﬁrm commitment for a shelter from
the provincial government. “I hope

that by raising it now, that people
would understand the link between
the missing women—women continue to go missing—and the need for
24/7 shelter,” Woodsworth said.
An Oct. 16 Vision Vancouver news
release states a 24-hour a day, seven-days-a-week women’s shelter is
recommended in the city’s affordable housing and homelessness plan,
which was supported by every councillor except Anton. The release says
Anton was the only member of council to vote against the city providing
ongoing support for homeless shelters. “Of course if there’s a need for
the shelter I support it,” Anton said
Oct. 19. She opposed the larger homelessness plan for other reasons.
B.C. Housing recently gave the
Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre more than $230,000 to extend the
hours of the shelter it runs in its life
skills centre. Women’s centre coordinator Alice Kendall said the money
was granted as a response to seven
reported sexual assaults of women
at the First United Church shelter between October 2010 and January 2011,
and what she said was the church’s
failure to address problems that would
make its shelter safer.
The women’s centre now offers
50 cots, and mats, to women from 6

p.m. to 9 a.m. ﬁve days a week and
all weekend. “During the time that
we became aware of these sexual assaults, there was very little response,
actually none. It took a lot of time to
get a meeting with the city, and it is
opportunistic that now it’s used during this election,” Kendall said.
She says a low-barrier shelter for
women that’s open around the clock
is needed in the Downtown Eastside
in addition to the 52-bed Powell Place,
which is run by the St. James Community Services Society, and the 12-bed
Bridge shelter run by Atira Women’s
Resource Society. Both places are usually full. “We know with situations of
violence against women in the community that a safe place to go is very
needed and one where you’re not
asked too many questions about why
you’re there or what you’re there for,
and that’s open 24 hours because violence happens all the time,” she said.
A spokesperson for the Ministry Responsible for Housing told the Courier
in an email Oct. 19 that the ministry
is working towards establishing a
women-only, 24/7 low-barrier shelter
and drop-in centre in the Downtown
Eastside and that “a number” of sites
are being considered.
crossi@vancourier.com
Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi

UBC researchers are recruiting 11-16 yr olds
and their parents to participate in a weight
loss study.
What’s involved? Learning fun ways to live
a healthy lifestyle using our internet
program with support from our health
counsellors. Honorarium provided.
Contact us at 604-875-2000 x 6393 or
email mysteps@cfri.ubc.ca for more info.

ALL CANDIDATES
MEETING AT HASTINGS
COMMUNITY CENTRE
The Hastings Community Association will be hosting an All
Candidates Meeting on Thursday, October 27th at 7:00pm.
Candidates conﬁrmed to date are:
Melissa DeGenova, NPA
Adriane Carr, Green Party
Jamie Lee Hamilton
Meet the candidates, have your questions answered and become
better informed. This promises to be an exciting evening of discussion
& debate. Please join us on Thursday, October 27th at 7:00pm at

Hastings Community Centre • 3096 E. Hastings St.
MAKE AN INFORMED CHOICE ON ELECTION DAY

For the ﬁrst time in seven years, the
Vancouver Police Department is in danger of running a deﬁcit because of its
continued monitoring of the “Occupy
Vancouver” protest outside the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Police Chief Jim Chu warned the Vancouver Police Board Wednesday that
deploying ofﬁcers to the protest since it
began Saturday has been expensive and
“threatens our ability to meet our budget this year.”
“The cost of the policing is not trivial but we’re going to deploy what we
need to keep the protesters as well as
the public safe,” Chu told reporters after
the board meeting but wouldn’t reveal
costs or number of ofﬁcers working the
protest. “For any event where there’s an
extended period of time that it’s going
to occur, and when we don’t know for
certainty what kind of event it’s going
to be, it is very difﬁcult to put a ﬁnal
budget number on it.”
The VPD’s operating budget hovers
around $200 million but it has no contingency fund other than a $2.4 million
criminal investigation budget that goes
toward overtime costs related to homicides, kidnappings and major crimes.
Until the protest began Saturday, the

chief said, the department was on course
to balance its budget for the seventh
consecutive year—even with policing
costs associated to the Stanley Cup playoffs and the June 15 riot which erupted
downtown after the Canucks lost to the
Boston Bruins in Game 7. “When we’re
near the end of the year, and an unexpected event occurs like ‘Occupy Vancouver’, then it doesn’t give us an opportunity through other months to try to
make up for the shortfall that this may
cause us,” the chief said.
The department is also not allowed
to use any surpluses from previous
years. But Mayor Gregor Robertson,
who is chairperson of the police board,
wouldn’t commit to changing the arrangement when questioned after the
meeting. “The police have had a stellar record the last six years, and so
it’s an extraordinary year like this that
provokes the question around having a
contingency in the VPD budget,” Robertson told the Courier. “I’m certainly
open-minded to new approaches.”
If the VPD runs a deﬁcit, the mayor
said it would likely be covered by a
city contingency fund. But what’s the
consequence to the VPD of going over
budget?
“That’s a good question,” Robertson
said. “It hasn’t happened under my
watch and for several years before, so it’s

obviously something we’ll look closely
at what next steps and proactive approaches we can take so the police can
address an extraordinary year like this.”
So far, the mayor has no plans to order the dozens of people in tents to leave
the grounds of the art gallery. “The best
thing is to let the protest continue, as
is, and make sure that it stays peaceful
and non-violent and clean—and doesn’t
disrupt the activity downtown,” he said,
noting the city-funded ﬁre department
and street engineering crews are monitoring the protest but he didn’t know
the cost when questioned Wednesday.
Police board member Glenn Wong
said it was important the public knows
the VPD balanced its budget for six consecutive years and has had surpluses.
Wong said he’ll continue to “hold the
department’s feet to the ﬁre” on day-today spending but added that he will be
“non-apologetic” to city hall if the VPD
does run a deﬁcit this year. “I appreciate
the sensitivity and the strong ﬁnancial
management that the department has,
and if we go over budget with explanation, I’m OK with that,” said Wong,
noting the city should be reminded the
VPD doesn’t have a contingency fund
“for these huge variable costs that come
our way.”
mhowell@vancourier.com
Twitter: @Howellings

Join us for a special presentation by Uniworld Boutique River Cruising.

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Police chief warns of pending budget deﬁcit

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Who Invented the Automobile?
The word automobile
is a French word with
Greek and Latin roots
meaning a vehicle that
moves itself. Car, the
common alternative
name, originates from
the Latin word carrus
or carrum for ‘wheeled
vehicle’ or the Middle
English word carre
for “cart”, words that
are believed to have
Cedric Hughes
originated from the
Gaulish word karros
referring to a Gallic Chariot. Car became
synonymous with automobile around the end of
the 19th century, when early models were called
horseless carriages.
These days we think of the car as almost a
wholly 20th century invention, but, like the
ancient origins of its name, its history is, at
least conceptually, rooted in inventions dating
back to the 17th century. In 1672, Ferdinand
Verbiest, a Flemish member of a Jesuit mission
in China, designed a 65 cm-long steam-powered,
self-propelled vehicle for the Chinese Emperor.
Steam generated in a ball-shaped boiler and
directed through a horizontal pipe at the top
towards a simple, open turbine reportedly turned
the rear wheels of a four-wheeled platform-like
carriage.
Verbiest’s design is recorded in drawings and
since it was only a scale model not designed to
actually carry human passengers or a driver, it’s
a stretch to call it a car. Nor is it known if the
model was actually built. Nevertheless, it was a
harbinger of things to come in the next century
when inventors in France, Britain, Russia and
the United States worked on designing steampowered self-propelled vehicles large enough
and maneuverable enough to transport people
and cargo on roadways.
Powering such vehicles was not the only
challenge. The origins of modern braking
systems, transmissions, steering mechanisms,
and a host of other inter-related technologies date
back to this era as well.
By the latter half of the 19th century, several
German inventors working independently on

vehicles
powered
by gasoline fuelled
internal combustion
engines succeeded in
producing what some
refer to now as “the
first really practical
automobiles.” Karl
Benz in 1885 built the
first vehicle that bears
significant similarity
to today’s motor
vehicle— the Benz
Barrister & Solicitor
Patent “Motorwagen”.
The
Motorwagen
achieved renown when Mr. Benz’s wife, Bertha
Benz demonstrated its fitness for daily use by
driving it from Mannheim to Pforzheim and
back — more than 80 kilometres (50 mi) —in
August 1888.

THE
ROAD
RULES

In the United States, the history of the automobile
is not so much about the origins of ingenious
technological invention as it is about the origins
of modern manufacturing, marketing, and
business organization and management systems.
In 1893, two brothers, Charles and Frank Duryea,
bicycle mechanics, constructed a roadworthy
copy of Benz’s Motorwagen in their shop in
Springfield, Massachusetts. The brothers founded
what is considered to be the first American
automobile manufacturing company, the Duryea
Motor Wagon Company. In 1896, they sold
their first vehicle and proceeded ambitiously to
produce 12 more just like it.

ance, 90-year-old park board
watchdog Eleanor Hadley
and 19 others are vying for
the seven park board seats.
Twenty people are contesting the nine school board
seats, including independent city council candidate
Bang Nguyen.
Voters will also be asked to
authorize borrowing $179.8
million for community facilities and parks, transportation and public safety and
civic facilities. The list of 94
candidates exceeds the 86
who ran in 2008, but it is nowhere as long as the 1996 record of 170. That’s when the
NPA’s Philip Owen beat 57
challengers to win his second mayoralty. Many of the
wannabe mayors were fringe
candidates taking advantage
of the lack of ﬁling fees or
legal name requirements,
including Zippy the Circus
Chimp (264 votes), Lupo the
Butcher (69), Mr. X (68) and
L. Ron Moonbeam (25).
Voting is open to Canadian citizens 18 or older as of
Nov. 19 who have lived in
B.C. for the last six months
and have been a Vancouver
resident or property owner
for at least 30 days before
voter registration.
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McGuire, the owner and
operator of a limousine service, wants a partial ward
system, a surtax on empty
housing units, an ombudsman for the homeless and
licensing of cyclists. “It’s
actually in their own interest,” said McGuire. “If a cyclist gets hit and run, they’re
screwed.”
McGuire called the bylaw
ticket adjudication system
enacted under Vision Vancouver “the next best thing
to a feudal system, there is
no recourse.”
Forty-one people are running for the 10 seats on city
council. NSV is ﬁelding four,
while three are in the contest under the De-Growth
Vancouver banner, including
Olympic critic Chris Shaw.
Adriane Carr unsuccessfully
ran for the Green Party federally and provincially and
is her party’s only candidate for council. Anti-gambling expansion campaigner
Sandy Garossino may be the
best-known independent,
while Amy “Evil Genius”
Fox may have the best nickname of the bunch.
Flamboyant former NPA
member Jamie Lee Hamilton of the Independent
Democratic Electors Alli-

There are plenty of alternatives to incumbent Vision
Vancouver Mayor Gregor
Robertson, his NPA challenger Coun. Suzanne Anton and their parties in
Vancouver’s Nov. 19 civic
election.
Robertson and Anton are
two of the dozen people who
registered their candidacy
for the mayoralty. Among
those who ﬁled by the Oct.
14 deadline are Dubgee,
Darrell “Saxmaniac” Zimmerman and leaders of two
new electoral organizations,
Vancouver Citizen’s Voice’s
Gerry McGuire and Randy
Helten of Neighbourhoods
for a Sustainable Vancouver. “Vancouver has some
fundamental problems in
the direction it’s going and
we have problems the way
democracy is functioning,”
said Helten, an ex-Vision
Vancouver member who
wants more neighbourhood
control over development.
“We’re at a fork in the
road, if either NPA or Vision Vancouver get majority
at council, we will see the
EcoDensity doctrine put on
steroids and the rights and
opinions of citizens and
neighbourhoods will be further ignored for years.”

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Not until 1908 did Henry Ford start selling
his brilliant interpretation of the concept, in
impressive numbers. From 1908 until 1927,
the Ford Motor Company manufactured what
remains the most influential, iconic, and longest
running best-selling —surpassed only by the
Volkswagen Beetle in 1972—motor vehicle of
the twentieth century, the Model T Ford.

cemeteries in Burnaby or North Vancouver,
Surrey or wherever. For a lot of those folks
who have wanted to be buried in the cemetery but didn’t buy space prior to 1986,
they now have a limited opportunity.”
Working under the provincial Cremation,
Interment and Funeral Services Act that
allows cemeteries to reclaim grave space
purchased over 50 years ago but never
used, the city acquired 160 vacant plots.
Just over 100 of them have been put up for
sale. Forty graves capable of holding the
remains of 400 people, which includes created remains, were placed on the market
in the summer and were quickly snapped
up by 300 buyers.
“Many cemeteries only allow one casket in a grave, some will allow two—a
deep casket and a standard casket—but at
Mountain View, we allow families after 40
years to bury another casket in that same
space. By then, natural decomposition
means there is very little left of the casket
and the human remains.”
Twitter: @ﬂematic

Already a notoriously expensive place to
live, Vancouver is also about to become a
more expensive place to rest in peace.
City council approved a staff recommendation earlier this month to make the cost
of being placed six feet under at least 10
per cent higher at the city’s only cemetery.
It’s one of several municipal licence and
service fee increases set to kick off at the
beginning of 2012.
While most fees—including building permits, animal licences and business licence
fees for marinas that allow live-aboard
boats—only saw a two per cent increase,
the cost of doing business at the 106-acre
Mountain View Cemetery shot up higher
because rates haven’t changed since 2007.
“Most fee-charging community services
in the city go for annual increases and typically the cost of inﬂation was the guideline,” said manager Glenn Hodges, who
has been running the 125-year-old cemetery for the past decade. “The cemetery
for some reason was never part of that
regularly update of fees and we’re trying
to be more like that, so this year we managed to get in on the same report and it
seemed like an appropriate place to start
with to make up for the lack of it for past
few years.”
The increase will affect a variety of grave
matters, some costing even more than the
proposed 10 per cent to reﬂect market values. The current cost for a single-depth
adult casket, for example, is $880, and staff
recommend raising it to $1,100 for next
year. A deep-depth casket would go up to
$2,000 from $1,760, while costs for a standard, two-person interment of cremated remains would go up to $2,500 from $2,000.
However, the cost of many other services
and products—including infants’ and children’s caskets, administration fees and hall
rentals—would remain at the current rate.
Despite the higher fees, Hodges said
that now is a rare opportunity to acquire
a plot at Mountain View because it is the
ﬁrst time they’ve been for sale in a quarter
century.
“We’ve sold more than 90,000 of them
between 1886 and 1986, but we haven’t
sold any for 25 years and we think we can
get up to another 1,000 that will be available over the next few years,” said Hodges.
“If people didn’t have already a space in
the cemetery, the family would have to go
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Vancouver’s city manager continues to insist the
Olympic Village loss is under $50 million, but Vision
Vancouver Coun. Geoff
Meggs concedes that it
looks much bigger.
Last April, the city disclosed a $48 million write
down on the $1.1 billion
project originally developed
by Millennium, whose
Southeast False Creek division went into receivership
last November over $740
million owing to the city.
Millennium paid a $29 million deposit, but not the
remaining $170 million for
the land.
“We can debate that
whether it’s a loss or not,
but our accountants tell us
no, and the common sense
view is that it is,” Meggs
said Tuesday. “That was
money that we didn’t know
if we would get.”
City manager Penny Ballem told council that the
debt has been reduced to
$446 million, in part from
the sale of 170 condominiums for $122.5 million
since February’s rebranding as the Village on False
Creek under receiver Ernst
and Young.
“The sales are ticking
along, they are steady,”
Ballem told council. “They
happened in all price ranges and every day there’s a
change.”
Marketer Bob Rennie
told the Courier that three
more deals worth $6.82
million were completed
Monday, meaning 436 of
the 737 condominiums are
sold. Another seven deals
are pending for $6.78 million. “We’re dealing with
homeowners, we’re get-

In Olympic Village news, Coun. Geoff Meggs (top) acknowledges perception problems while
city manager Penny Ballem refuses to disclose monthly sales ﬁgures.
photo Jason Lang
ting the target audience
out there, we’re getting the
West Side buyers, we’re
getting the golf course
membership buyers that
are selling their West Side
homes and buying in,”
Rennie said. “It’s phenomenal, I am ecstatic.”
Pent-up demand resulted
in 118 sales within the ﬁrst
45 days of the relaunch, but
the pace has slowed and
55 have sold in the last six
months. Rennie said he expects to sell out in 2013, a
year longer than what he
told the Urban Development Institute in a May
2010 speech.
Ballem refused to disclose monthly sales ﬁgures.
Rennie said to do so would
“disturb the asset.”
Ballem said the city still
expects to net $45.3 million
from the sale of 32 properties transferred by Millennium to help pay its debt.

The city sold four Burnaby
condominiums and one in
Toronto worth a combined
net $1.1 million since April.
A dozen retail strata units
are on the block and the old
Province building at 198
West Hastings, appraised at
$10 million, will soon be offered by tender.
HSBC now holds a $49.55
million mortgage on the
Millennium and Concord
Paciﬁc joint development
of the 21-storey Alexandra
English Bay tower at Davie
and Bidwell streets. Concord has an option to buy
the city’s $5 million fourth
mortgage. Concord, coincidentally, was one of the
two losing bidders in April
2006 to develop the Olympic Village.
Last February, Ballem
signed a Land Title Ofﬁce
form that discharged Millennium from a mortgage
originally worth $1 billion.

The mortgage stemmed
from a September 2008
ﬂoating debenture granted
by Millennium to the city in
exchange for a $100 million
bailout when Olympic Village lender Fortress Credit
Corporation stopped paying amid the global credit
crunch. Ballem denied the
city went soft on Millennium because Alexandra is
to contain 49 rental apartments under the city’s Short
Term Incentives for Rental
program.
“The difference between
a billion and what we got?
That’s a question that I can
understand why people
would ask that, but we got
our hands on anything and
everything,” Ballem said.
“There were some properties where the mortgaging
was bigger than the equity
and value in them, so we
let them go.”
2010goldrush@gmail.com

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news

12th & Cambie

with Mike Howell

Doubling down

Vision Vancouver made its
ﬁrst campaign announcement Wednesday.
And it wasn’t exactly a
gamble, so to speak. Mayor
Gregor Robertson announced
a moratorium on gambling
expansion in Vancouver and
reafﬁrmed the ruling party’s
opposition to a downtown
mega casino.
So what’s new here? Not
sure.
As faithful readers will
recall, Robertson and his
council—including
NPA
Coun. Suzanne Anton, who
is running for mayor—voted
unanimously in April not to
allow Paragon Gaming to expand its Edgewater Casino to
a site adjacent to B.C. Place
Stadium.
In April, council also
agreed to a moratorium on
applications to expand gambling until the provincial
government and the B.C.
Lottery Corporation under-

take a “comprehensive public consultation” on expanded gambling in Vancouver.
Paragon’s proposal called
for doubling the 75 tables
at Edgewater to 150 at the
new casino, and tripling its
520 slots to 1,500. If built, it
would have been the largest
casino in Western Canada.
I missed what Robertson
said outside the Telus World
of Science, the Edgewater Casino a convenient backdrop
for the television cameras.
So I spoke to Vision Coun.
Geoff Meggs. “The mayor
emphasized that the moratorium is very, very ﬁrm—that
he’s not interested and we’re
not interested in referendums or big reviews or other
attempts to create expansion
in the city,” Meggs said. “He
also wanted to make it clear
that our position has been
consistent and Suzanne Anton’s has been completely
incomprehensible.”
So Vision’s taking a hard
line on gambling expansion. But it’s a fact that in
January 2004, city council
approved slot machines for
the Edgewater, making it the
ﬁrst gambling facility in the
city to have the machines.
Then-Vision mayor Larry
Campbell and Vision councillors Jim Green, Raymond
Louie, Tim Stevenson and

COPE Coun. David Cadman
voted for slots. Vision has
also accepted money from
Edgewater ($2,500 in 2008,
$3,080 in 2005) and Great
Canadian Casino ($10,500
in 2008, $30,750 in 2005),
which operates Hastings
Racecourse—where
there
are slots—to fund its election campaigns. And, according to Meggs, Vision has
no plans to refuse money
this campaign from casino
companies.
But what’s the public to
make of a political party that
says no to expanded gambling, but yes to donations
from casino companies?
“Vision’s proposition for
a long time has been there
should be a rule for all parties not to take money from
developers or unions and
just make it individuals,”
Meggs said. “In the absence
of that, we’ve been accepting money from unions and
from corporations and we
will continue to do so. And
I don’t think we’ve singled
out one group that we won’t
take it from. So if they want
to come to our fundraising
dinner, for example, I personally have no problem
with that.”
More on this on my blog.
mhowell@vancourier.com
Twitter: @Howellings

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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011 THE VANCOUVER COURIER

news

Jurors appreciated playful, contemporary style

Book about misﬁts lands literary award
Cheryl Rossi
Staff writer

Michael Christie was “thrilled and surprised”
that his collection of short stories The Beggar’s
Garden was awarded the city’s book award
Oct. 18.
“There’re so many great books on the list,
I certainly didn’t expect it,” said the 35-yearold who received a $2,000 prize.
The other ﬁnalists were Lynne Bowen’s
Whoever Gives Us Bread, library writer in
residence Wayde Compton’s After Canaan:
Essays on Race, Writing and Region, and
former Courier ﬁction contest winter Lesley
McKnight’s Vancouver Kids.
Christie’s book includes nine linked stories
of misﬁt characters in the Downtown Eastside.
The former professional skateboarder, who received his master’s of ﬁne arts in creative writing from the University of B.C. in 2009, served
as an outreach worker for a shelter in the area
and then for the Vancouver courthouse for
six years. Christie said they were difﬁcult jobs
that led to burnout from witnessing so much
suffering. “I’m not trying to show people how
bad it is down there and then after I do that
maybe everyone will care,” Christie said. “It’s
a very complex situation and there are a lot
of paradoxes, so it’s a great ﬁctional setting in
that there are all these worlds colliding in this
one neighbourhood and within the individuals in that neighbourhood.”
Lee Henderson, 2009 winner of the Vancou-

ver Book Award for his novel The Man Game,
said he and the other independent jurors that
included bookseller Emilie Dierking and poet
Jim Wong-Chu, chose the four shortlisted
books for their quality and style of writing,
research, sense of personal connection and
how they revealed different facets of Vancouver. Publishers submitted more than 50 books
to be judged.
Of The Beggar’s Garden, Henderson said:
“It wasn’t a book in a sense about a place
with an acronym. It’s not a DTES book.”
Instead, the jurors appreciated its sensitive
renderings and playful, contemporary style.
The jurors favoured the innovative way Vancouver Kids tells the city’s history through the
eyes of children. Henderson was impressed by
the rigour of Compton’s “brilliant” collection
of essays. He said Bowen’s non-ﬁction book
that recounts the history of Italian immigrant
settlement in B.C. and the Italian-Canadian
contribution to Vancouver was a beautifully
researched page-turner. “We all appreciated
one thing in common, which was the stories
of the people whose stories don’t make it
into TV shows and movies,” Henderson said.
“These are people who need books for their
lives to be shed some light upon.”
The Beggar’s Garden was long-listed for
the Giller Prize and is a ﬁnalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize that will be announced in two weeks.
crossi@vancourier.com
Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi

A21

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A22

THE VANCOUVER COURIER FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011

news

Ushers, ﬁrst aid attendants, security guards could walk off job today

Whitecaps will end season without B.C. Place strike
Bob Mackin
Contributing writer

Injuries and suspensions, a
coaching change and player
waivers, a postponement,
no-shows by superstars
Thierry Henry and David
Beckham and not a single
win on the road.
The list of things that
have gone wrong for the
last-place Vancouver Whitecaps in their difﬁcult ﬁrst
Major League Soccer season
will not, however, include a
workers’ strike at B.C. Place
Stadium.
The 6-17-10 club’s season ﬁnale will go ahead as
scheduled on Saturday at
4 p.m. against the defending league-champion Colorado Rapids. Members of
the B.C. Government and
Service Employees’ Union’s
local 1703 will be in a legal

strike position on Saturday
morning, but they have
decided not to disrupt the
game.
“We made the decision
not to,” said BCGEU spokeswoman Karen Tankard. “It’s
a gesture of goodwill. Let’s
get back to the table.”
The ushers, maintenance
and tradespeople, ﬁrst aid
attendants and security
guards voted 89 per cent
last month in favour of a
strike against B.C. Pavilion
Corporation. Their contract
expired May 31. Renewed
talks broke down Tuesday
and 72-hour strike notice
was issued.
“In a season that’s been
as difﬁcult as it has been for
us, the way fans have stuck
with us, [we want] to say
thank you to them,” said
Whitecaps’ chief executive
Paul Barber.

The Vancouver Whitecaps and B.C. Lions play at B.C. Place
photo Dan Toulgoet
Stadium.
No suitable alternative
exists locally for the Whitecaps. Swangard Stadium is
too small and temporary
Empire Field, which the
club vacated on Sept. 24, is
rapidly being dismantled by
contractor Nussli.
BCGEU
picket
lines
would not have kept White-

caps or Rapids players out
of B.C. Place. MLS Players’
Union general counsel Jon
Newman said their contract
includes a no strike/no
lockout clause.
“While we may support
the efforts of Local 1703
and the stadium workers,
our players cannot refuse

to enter the stadium,” Newman told the Courier.
Tankard said what happens Sunday and beyond
is unknown. She said the
union would rather return
to negotiations than strike.
The B.C. Lions host the
Edmonton Eskimos in the
next scheduled B.C. Place
event on Oct. 29.
A prepared statement issued Tuesday by PavCo’s
public relations company,
Pace Group, said management was “disappointed”
because it had agreed to “a
number of signiﬁcant union
demands” before the BCGEU asked mediator Mark
Brown to book out.
“Should the BCGEU commence strike action and
withdraw their members,
B.C. Place will be unable
to operate for upcoming
scheduled events,” said the

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statement.
“PavCo stresses that it
has agreed to numerous
union proposals in the past
six months, including some
new issues introduced late
in the process. PavCo has
also agreed to accept the
mediator’s recommendations in full.”
A BCGEU statement said:
“The focus of the bargaining committee has been
around job security, which
is our key issue. We are
concerned about contracting out and reduction of
work hours.”
The last time the BCGEU
went on strike at the stadium in February 2005, the
provincial government intervened to solve the shortlived walkout that delayed
set-up for the annual boat
show.
2010goldrush@gmail.com

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news
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Former Vancouver city councillor
Jim Green is downplaying his split
with the developer of B.C. Housing’s controversial Little Mountain
housing project.
Green was a community relations
consultant to Holborn Properties
and quit last week, citing a lack of
autonomy from president Joo Kim
Tiah.
“A difference in philosophy, a difference in strategy on how we move
forward,” Green told the Courier.
“I thought it was best that I be no
longer associated with the development. I resigned. I wish them all the
best of luck, it was a good project, I
just felt my tenure there was over.”
Holborn spokeswoman Maggie
Wen said Tuesday the company

would issue a news release on the
matter, but on Thursday she said
there would be no such news release. She did not fulfill a request
by the Courier to interview Tiah.
“This is a private matter between
Holborn Properties and Jim Green
and Associates,” Wen said via
email. “We have no further comments to the media and we wish Mr.
Green all the best in his future endeavors.”
On Green’s blog, he described the
site as an L-shaped, 15.2 acre parcel
of land between Main and Ontario
streets, from 33rd Avenue to 37th.
B.C. Housing is to retain ownership until it is rezoned and a development permit is issued. Holborn
wants to include 234 units of social
housing among the total 2,000.

The development is to replace the
1950s era complex which had 224
units. Residents were evicted and
the buildings were mostly demolished before the 2010 Winter Olympics. Holborn has pledged to offer
a right of first refusal for the new
non-market housing to the ex-residents who were relocated.
City manager Penny Ballem said
she expects a report to council early
in 2012.
“It’s a complicated project, it’s
another project that the deal was
cut when everything was booming,”
Ballem said. “The province and developer continue to work together
to find a formula that they can come
forward and make it work.”
—Bob Mackin
2010goldrush@gmail.com

Everyone is invited to attend these information sessions.
Bring your questions and hear what they have to say.
Hosted by the West End Community Centre Association
www.westendcc.ca

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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011 THE VANCOUVER COURIER

A25

10070114

travel

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photo Brenda Jones

Hunting ghosts in Alamo city
Brenda Jones
Contributing writer

SAN ANTONIO, Texas—We meet JR Pleban
under the cloak of darkness, in a courtyard within earshot of spooky sounds and
screams emanating from Ripley’s Haunted
House, located halfway down the street.
Before meeting, Pleban instructs us to look
for a guy in a straw hat—and only that
person. Apparently, with six ghost tour
operators in San Antonio, competition can
be ﬁerce and sometimes people who have
booked with him end up on another operator’s tour.
On this Thursday night, there are 16 of
us on the Ghost Hunt walking tour, but on
a Friday or Saturday night, Pleban can have
as many as 120 people on his tours.
The main selling point for Alamo City

Ghost Tours’ Ghost Hunt is that it comes
complete with sophisticated “ghost hunting” equipment for participants to use.
These include thermal meters for detecting
cold spots, EMF meters to measure electromagnetic ﬁelds, and dowsing rods to ﬁnd
energy ﬁelds. Pleban tells us a shift of a full
8 degrees Fahrenheit in just one spot on a
surface can be an indication of a ghostly
presence. A ﬁnal piece of equipment that
everyone is asked to bring is their camera.
Sometimes images appear on cameras that
are not seen with the naked human eye.
Pleban has been offering historical tours
in San Antonio since 1996, and started this
ghost hunt tour seven years ago, when his
was one of only a few in the United States.
He has been part of the San Antonio Ghost
Hunters society for more than 20 years.
Continued on next page

Continued from page 25
He’s also convinced he
saw the ghost of a dead aunt
in a stairwell when he was
a boy. He takes his tours
very seriously. “I won’t be
telling you all goofball stories—everything is factual
and true,” Pleban says during the introduction to the
tour.
He believes that San Antonio’s history as a key battleground makes it a fertile
hunting ground for ghosts.
“San Antonio is a city built
on a town, built on a village—
and it’s been here since the

1700s,” Pleban says. “There
have been a lot of battles and
a lot of death here.”
Pleban notes that it is
generally accepted that energy, which can be picked
up by the dowsing rod,
leaves the body when
someone dies. “A lot of
people believe ghosts are
tied to a tragic death or
unﬁnished business, but I
don’t believe that. Anytime
someone dies, they leave
energy behind.”
The ﬁrst stop on the tour
is outside the famously
haunted Menger Hotel,

Tour guide JR Pleban uses dowsing rods to ﬁnd spirphoto Brenda Jones
its of the dearly departed.
which is said to be occupied
by as many as 20 spirits, in-

cluding former U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt, who

visited the hotel three times
during his life. The most
frequently reported ghost
is Sally White, a maid who
was killed at the Menger
Hotel by her husband in the
1870s. Pleban says folks report that she carries stacks
of towels on the third ﬂoor
and sometimes appears in
guests’ rooms when they
are sleeping and tidies their
belongings on the dresser.
We also visit the San Fernando Cathedral, which is
said to house the remains
of Alamo defenders, and is
where the outlines of faces

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appear to emerge in the
brick work and plaster on
external building walls behind tombs. The 13th and
ﬁnal stop is at the historic
Spanish Governors Palace, where Pleban stops in
front of a window to point
to where a young girl was
once entombed in a wall
and is said to haunt the
home.
Notably, while the tour
was very educational about
the history of San Antonio
and many of its haunted
spots, we did not encounter any ghosts, nor did our
ghost hunting equipment
detect any paranormal activity. In fact, a test Pleban
performed with the dowsing
rods, using tour participants
as volunteers failed on two
occasions. It involved a volunteer holding the L-shaped
dowsing rod in a neutral position and asking it to point
to a speciﬁc person. However, my test of the dowsing
rod, whereby I said, “Mr.
Dowsing Rod point to Krystal,” worked not just once,
but twice, which sold me
on the power of the dowsing rod.
After an evening of fun
and adventure, it was with
some reluctance that we
bid good-bye to our eccentric tour guide, but it wasn’t
without the promise of possibly meeting again. In fact,
one day, Pleban might be
one of the ghosts lurking
the streets of San Antonio:
“I’m not looking forward to
dying. If I have a choice, I’d
want to be left behind.”
What to know if booking a Ghost Hunt:
You’re unlikely to see
any ghosts, and if you do,
it will probably be in a
photograph, such as a person on the branch of a 300year-old tree that was used
for hangings.
Dress for the weather,
wear comfortable shoes,
and be prepared to walk
two kilometres. The tour
visits 13 haunted sites in
the downtown core. Alamo
City Ghost Hunts are $15
for adults and $10 for minors. Visit alamocityghosttours.com for more details.
Where to eat and stay:
The elegant Hotel Contessa is located along the
scenic Riverwalk and is an
easy 10-minute walk from
where the ghost hunt begins. While this all-suite
hotel does not offer ghostly
encounters, the service is
out of this world. We started out our evening at the
hotel’s restaurant, Las Rambas, enjoying dinner on the
river-side outdoor patio.
For more information, visit
thehotelcontessa.com.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011 THE VANCOUVER COURIER

A27

community briefs
Protect pets

The B.C. SPCA reminds pet
owners to think about their
animals’ safety Halloween
night. Loud noises and visits from costumed children
trick or treating can be upsetting to pets or lead to
accidents. When dogs and
cats are frightened, they’re
more likely to run away,
jump out of open windows
or dart into trafﬁc. Stressed
pets can also behave out of
character by scratching or
biting people. Pets should
be kept inside. Some do
well in a separate room
with the radio or television
on to mask the sound of
ﬁreworks or trick-or-treaters. Leave toys in the room
so the animal doesn’t perceive being left in the room
as a punishment. Consider
disconnecting the doorbell
if your pet is disturbed by
the noise. Make sure your
animal is wearing identiﬁcation. Keep treats away
from animals as they can
cause health problems.
Don’t bring pets trick-ortreating and don’t put costumes on them.

Pavilion turns 100

You are invited to join the
Heritage Vancouver Society, the Vancouver Heritage
Foundation and the Vancouver Board of Parks and
Recreation in a celebration
to mark the 100th anniversary of the Stanley Park Pavilion and Rock Garden. It
begins at 10 a.m. Oct. 23.
The ﬁrst Heritage Foundation’s “Places that Matter”
plaque will be unveiled.
Afterwards, enjoy refreshments supplied by Daniel
Group, historical displays
and photographs and tours
of the Rock Garden. Then
end your morning with a
Heritage Vancouver walking tour at 11:30 a.m. It includes visits to the Dining
Pavilion, the Rock Garden,
Malkin Bowl, the Rose Gar-

den and Park Memorials.
Donald Luxton will be your
guide. Tour is by donation
on a ﬁrst-come basis.

Hastings wetlands

Attention Hastings Park
sanctuary visitors: Please
be advised that wetland
water levels may ﬂuctuate at the sanctuary due
to nearby sewer upgrade
work. The storm sewer
system that feeds the
sanctuary wetland will
be drained, which could
result in a drop in water
levels. The sewer work is
part of the city’s ongoing
sewer separation program
which sees the replacement of older shared storm
and sanitary sewers with
separated sewers, eliminating combined sewer overﬂow (CSO) during heavy
rainfalls. The work began
Oct. 11 and will take approximately six weeks to
complete. The work is
necessary for the eventual
“day-lighting” of a stream
connection between the
sanctuary wetland and
Burrard Inlet, part of the
Hastings Park Master Plan.

Members of the collective
will be available to share
their experience of this
year’s seed harvest. Light
refreshments and cookies
will be available. Cost is $10
or by donation—no one will
be turned away for lack of
funds. The workshop is suitable for all levels. For those
who haven’t attended a
workshop before, the booklet The Five Levels of Seed
Saving is included with your

donation. Register by Oct.23
at ccseedsavingcollective@
gmail.com For more information, see ccseedsavers.
wordpress.com

Rooftop gardens

The park board is considering installing a communal
garden on the rooftop of the
West End Community Centre. Residents are invited to
share their visions of a garden at an ideas fair, Oct. 26.

The session runs from 3:30
to 6:30 p.m. in the lobby of
the West End Community
Centre, 870 Denman St. For
more information after the
meeting, see Vancouver.ca/
parks. Comments and queries can be sent to pbcomment@vancouver.ca.

Nelson Park potties

The park board is installing an accessible automated public toilet in Nelson

Park in the coming months.
Residents are invited to an
information session to view
the design and location and
ask questions of park board
staff, Oct. 27. The session
runs from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m.
at Lord Roberts Annex, 1150
Nelson St. For more information after the meeting,
see
Vancouver.ca/parks.
Comments and queries can
be sent to pbcomment@
vancouver.ca.

Get the best of both worlds,
Saturdays and Sundays.
p27 ﬁnal

Seed saving

Village
Vancouver’s
Cedar
Cottage
Seed
Saving
Collective
presents an urban seedsaving workshop from
6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Oct.
26 at Strathcona Community Centre, 601 Keefer St.
Speaker Justice Marshall
will provide a general overview of vegetable seed
types and seed-saving
techniques. Marshall apprenticed with Dan Jason
(Salt Spring Seeds) for the
1999 season. He previously
gardened at Hollyhock Retreat Centre and went on to
start Linnaea Farm Seeds in
2000. Bring your seed-saving experiences and freshly
harvested seed to clean
and process or give away.

SATURDAYS

SUNDAYS

WESTCOAST NEWS, CANADA & WORLD

LOCAL NEWS & OPINIONS

FOOD & WINE

ENTERTAINMENT

Wine expert Anthony Gismondi’s Eat/Drink Page

CANUCKS COVERAGE

WEEKEND REVIEW

VEHICLE PREVIEW NOV. 17

Books Reviews, Issues & Ideas, Health & Science

CANUCKS WHITE TOWEL NOV. 20

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE NOV. 19

Special Fan Pullout Section

SALUT! NOV. 26

Seniors

Wines for the Holidays

GREY CUP PREVIEW NOV. 24

BUSINESS, TRAVEL & MORE

COMICS, CROSSWORDS & MORE

Editorial content subject to change without notice.

SPECIAL LIMITED-TIME WEEKEND ONLY OFFER

coming up:

• Just Breathe: An increasing number of older women are being
diagnosed with COPD, a pulmonary disease often brought on by many
years of smoking. Find out how to cope, and the location of support groups
in your area.
• Memory Bank: Just in tiime for the holidays, learn ways to put all your
letters, mementos and photos in one (or more) beautiful scrapbooks, to
share with family.
• "What's On" in your neighbourhood has all the pre-holiday fun
- outings and more.

*Offer is for a print subscription to The Vancouver Sun delivered Saturdays only and The Province delivered Sundays only for a total cost of $9.96 per month for 6 months. Offer is only available to households in the Lower
Mainland delivery area that have not had home delivery of The Vancouver Sun or The Province within the past 45 days. Introductory price will be in effect for a 6-month term at which time delivery service will continue at
our regular home delivery rate. Price includes applicable taxes. Other restrictions may apply. Offer expires December 30, 2011.

A28

THE VANCOUVER COURIER FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011

Halloween
SPECIAL ADVERTISING FEATURE

discharged with a permit (only on
Oct. 31.) No person shall discharge
Family Fireworks in a street, lane,
or any other public place, except
as authorized by the Fire Chief.

FIREWORKS
REMINDER:
BETTER SAFE
THAN SORRY

H

Stories and photos from
your

community

~ In print and online all the time

alloween parties and ‘blastoffs’ are fun, but precious
eyes and fingers need to
be protected... so don’t be foolish.
Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services offers these words of wisdom
(plus a list of rules) to keep everyone safe this Halloween:

Information for Family
Fireworks

• Family Fireworks, not including
firecrackers, can only be purchased,
possessed and discharged with a
permit issued from the Fire Chief.
• Family Fireworks can be
purchased with a permit between
Oct. 25 and Oct. 31 inclusive, and

vancourier.com

• Citizens 19 years of age and
older who intend to purchase and
discharge fireworks in the City
of Vancouver on Halloween must
acquire and possess a permit. To
acquire a permit, citizens must
log onto vancouver.ca/fire, and
click on the Fireworks Permit link.
Fill out the application, read the
fireworks safety information, and
then answer an online “fireworks
safety test.”
• Upon successful completion of
the test, a permit will be issued
which can be printed. The printed
permit, and two pieces of ID are
required to purchase and discharge
fireworks.

Fireworks Safety Tips

• Before lighting fireworks, make
sure they are firmly planted in a
pail of sand or dirt.
• Stand well back when the
firework has been lit.
• Never hold fireworks in your
hand, or point them at people, animals or property.

UPCOMING HOME GAME

SAT., OCT 29 • 7PM

vs
PRESENTED BY:

THE

st
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PLACE

RACE FOR

GET YOUR TICKETS TODAY!

• Keep a charged hose or pail
of water handy when igniting
fireworks.
• Never pick up spent fireworks
until you’re absolutely sure they
are completely out.
• Ensure all clothing and/or costumes worn while igniting fireworks
are non-flammable.
If you require more details, contact
Fire Prevention at 604-873-7593.

MACABRE EVENTS
AND MORE!

compiled by Helen Peterson

T

here are many Halloween
happenings this month;
you’ll find local neighbourhoods that are “stirring the cauldron” with pumpkin carvings and
trick-or-treat events, geared at all
ages. Plus theatrical displays and
more; get out and get thrilled!
Creatures of the Night Candle
Lit Walks takes place at the Stanley Park Ecology Centre. It offers
a spooky learning experience that
gets kids face-to-face with flying
squirrels, owls, and other night-

by Village Museum’s Halloween Hysteria. Enjoy
treats at the Voodoo café
and dance a little jig at
the Vampire Ball. Costumes are encouraged;

go to www.burnabyvillagemuseum.ca for ticket
details.
Orange you glad you
went to Choices? The

Pumpkin sales campaign
is well underway at Choices Market. Every carved
pumpkin sold from now
until Oct. 31 will benefit
local elementary schools,

Fright Nights at Playland is a Halloween
experience for the lovers of freak, horror and
terror. Currently to Oct.
31 you’ll find disturbing
haunted houses, freaky
twilight rides, escapee axe
murderers and a handful
of monsters that fill all
of Playland, making for
a deathly night out! You
never know what creepy
creatures are waiting for
you in the shadows For
ticket reservation info,
go to www.pne.ca, then
Fright Nights.

Halloween Hysteria
Oct. 28 to 31 in the
evenings, vampires and
witches are wandering
the streets of the Burna-

On Halloween the Kerrisdale store will be decorated, with a haunted
house on site - go to www.
choicesmarkets.com for
more info.

It’s the seventh annual
Mount Pleasant Pumpkin Carving Challenge,
hosted by the Vancouver
City Police. The location
is Kingsgate Mall (corner of Kingsway and E.
Broadway) and it takes
place on Oct. 27 from 11
am to 1 pm. The judging will commence at
1:30 pm. Participants will
bring their own pumpkins
and carving tools and are
encouraged to dress in
Halloween
costumes.
Cheer on your favourite
opponent, it should be an
arresting event!
From 5 to 7 p.m. on
Oct. 29, it’s the first
annual Little Spooks &
Friendly Ghosts event at
VanDusen Botanical Garden. Brought to life by
Public Dreams Society, it
will include some gently
scary fun sure to delight
the little ones. Iconic stilt
characters, appropriately attired in spooky costume, will be wandering
the site that is decorated with Jack O’Lanterns,
activities for the kids,
and much more. Affordable tickets are available
in advance at the Garden
Shop or at the entrance.
Go to www.vandusengarden.org.

eight in all. One dollar
from each will go to the
fund; last year Choices
raised over $5,000. Get a
Choices pumpkin today,
and support education.

“My first car was a
convertible, and I’ve
had the top down
ever since.”
At Tapestry retirement communities, we believe
in the individual. So we structure all our programs to
FIXT @UC KUVQEVCI IVDU@EVG QFI NKQEBEQEIR QFNQ JIZVI
who you are. Whether it’s an interest in convertibles,
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Call us today and see what kind of individualized
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and spirit healthy, vibrant and young at heart.

lindawatts
Last week I was enjoying
lunch with friends when
the topic of conversation
turned to coconut oil. One
of my diet-conscious mates
was describing a dish she
recently prepared using
the tropical fat. Everyone
at the table was terribly
impressed; what a healthy
alternative to canola oil or
olive oil. To say that I didn’t
share my friends’ enthusiasm is putting it mildly.
For some time now, the
subject of coconut oil has
been setting off my crap
detector: an intuitive device that’s been honed
from years of observing the
worthy-of-consideration to
downright ludicrous trends
in food and nutrition.
When I began my undergraduate nutrition degree
in the early 1980s, coconut oil and the other tropical fat, palm oil, were well
established as the beloved
fats of food manufacturers.
Their creamy texture, long
self-life and low cost made
them ideal for producing
highly processed foods.
But by the end of that decade, about the time I started practising as a dietitian,
tropical oils experienced a
major fall from grace. Nutrition research revealed that
these fats were linked to elevated blood cholesterol levels and, as a consequence,
could increase our risk of
developing heart disease.

Now, more than 20 years
later, coconut oil can be
found in many natural and
health food stores where
shop owners ask a pretty
penny for products that
claim to cure a plethora of
health ailments.
Most of the positive
health effects associated
with coconut oil are based
on anecdotal evidence;
there isn’t a lot of published
research. But we do know
that the once-held belief
that saturated fat—whether
from animals or tropical
oils—raised blood cholesterol levels and increased
our risk of heart disease,
isn’t entirely true.
Today it’s clear that the
effects of saturated fat on
blood cholesterol levels
vary from person to person.
Genetics, body weight, gender and lifestyle (such as
diet, exercise, alcohol consumption and tobacco use)
need to be taken into consideration.
According to Dietitians
of Canada, there is some
scientiﬁc evidence that consuming coconut oil doesn’t
raise our total and low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels to the same
extent as butter. However,
coconut oil may increase
our blood cholesterol levels
to a greater extent than vegetable oils.
All fats and oils, whether
we’re talking about olive
oil, butter, walnut oil or
coconut oil, are comprised
of a mixture of saturated
and unsaturated fatty acids. While coconut oil is
a highly saturated fat, it
doesn’t appear to worsen or
improve cholesterol levels
in most people.
This ﬁnding is supported
by epidemiological studies that show people who
consume high coconut fat
diets—such as Polynesians—tend to have low choles-

ALL CANDIDATES
MEETINGS
AT

terol levels.
Although adding moderate amounts of coconut oil
in the context of a healthy
diet is unlikely to signiﬁcantly affect our heart
health, we still need to
practise caution; this fat’s

You trust BCAA to keep you on
the road, so trust us when it’s
time for your auto insurance.

p31 ﬁnal colour
Need auto insurance?
Trust the specialists.

With more auto insurance choices
than ever before, we can help you
ﬁnd the coverage that’s right for
you. And we offer Optional Auto
Insurance coverage with
our Member-exclusive BCAA
Advantage Auto.
Members, combine
your auto and home
insurance and save
up to $40.*
Give us a call, or drop by
your local BCAA office.

604.718.8201

Call or visit your nearest BCAA location
S P9DD4BFLU9V G:85 ;9B@ 8IB@ C=9R>9 S 6K8OG63O73KK
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Company of Canada and the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia. *Some restrictions apply. Maximum of
$40 savings are with a combination of BCAA Advantage Auto Insurance and BCAA Advantage Home Insurance.
Savings are on an annual basis and will be pro-rated when added mid-term.

The all-party Special Committee on Cosmetic Pesticides was appointed by the Legislative Assembly of
British Columbia to examine options for eliminating the unnecessary use of pesticides in British Columbia.

To assist you in making informed decisions on election day, Killarney
Community Centre Society is hosting two All Candidates Meetings on:

Come out to meet the candidates from various parties and join the
lively discussion. Get the answers to your questions and become
better informed. Open to the public. Don't miss out on
these evenings filled with excitement!

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON COSMETIC PESTICIDES

W E W A N T T O H E A R F R O M YO U !

Killarney Community Centre

Thursday October 27, 2011 @ 7:00pm for City Council
Wednesday November 2, 2011 @ 7:00pm for Park Board

at best; coconut oil is by no
means a weight-loss aid.
Linda Watts is a registered dietitian. Email questions to wattslin@gmail.
com and visit her food and
nutrition blog at lindawatts.
blogspot.com.

SAVE
UP TO
*
$

40

A32

THE VANCOUVER COURIER FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011

news
Courier sold to Glacier Media

Monday, NOVEMBER 7
7 pm | Doors 6:30 pm

St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church
1012 Nelson St. (at Burrard) Vancouver

Vancouver-based Glacier Media Inc. is
buying the Vancouver Courier from Postmedia Network Inc. On Tuesday, Postmedia announced a deﬁnitive agreement to
sell daily newspapers the Times Colonist,
Nanaimo Daily News and Alberni Valley
Times and its B.C. community newspaper properties—including the Courier—to
Glacier Media Inc. for $86.5 million. “We
are pleased to announce a transaction
that realizes the value of the community
newspaper groups in Western Canada
along with the Times Colonist, a newspaper with a proud 153-year history,”
said Paul Godfrey, Postmedia president
and CEO. The acquisition was the result
of an unsolicited offer for the Vancouver
Island newspapers and Lower Mainland
B.C. community newspaper properties.
Included in the transaction are three
daily newspapers and 20 weekly and biweekly community publications including the North Shore News, Burnaby Now
and Richmond News. The deal does not
include Postmedia’s Vancouver daily
newspapers: the Vancouver Sun and The
Province. The deal is subject to customary
closing conditions and regulatory approvals and is expected to close on or about
Nov. 30. The Courier was purchased by
Postmedia in 2010 as part of the sale of
bankrupt Canwest’s newspaper assets.

Sun Yat-Sen spooks
For more info:
staw.ca/debate

“The storm outside is the heaviest in
years. Your cart winds along a steep
mountain road. With a roar of thunder
the axel breaks. With a ﬂash of lightening, you glance at the surrounding hill-

side. It looks like you’ll have to spend the
night in the old Monastery where three
women mysteriously died last year. Will
you make it our alive?” For the ﬁrst time,
Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden is being transformed into a terrifying haunted house. Featuring almost 30
actors, dancers and musicians, this scary
experience is inspired by Robert van Gulik’s classic Judge Dee murder mysteries.
Brave the garden’s haunted pathways, uncover clues and then warm your bones at
the old Tea House as you piece the crime
together. But watch out. You never know
what may be lurking around the next corner. Seven Tyrants Theatre presents Judge
Dee & the Haunted Garden from Oct. 26
to 31 every 10 minutes between 7 and
10 p.m. at the garden, 578 Carrall St. at
Pender. For ticket information, call 604662-3207.

Fireworks permits

Permits are required for anyone planning
to buy and discharge ﬁreworks on Halloween in Vancouver, according to Vancouver Fire & Rescue Services. Individuals must be 19 years or older. Permits are
free, but applicants must successfully
complete a ﬁreworks safety test to acquire one. To write the test, go to vancouver.ca/ﬁre and follow the directions
or call 604-873-7593. Identiﬁcation and a
permit are required to both purchase and
discharge ﬁreworks. They may only be
purchased in the City of Vancouver between Oct. 25 and Oct. 31, and they can
only be discharged in Vancouver on Oct.
31. Fireworks can only be discharged on
private property.

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16th Annual Vancouver Courier

clouds and said. “It looks like you.” She pointed to the clouds and said. “It looks like
you.” She pointed to the clouds and said. “It looks like you.” She pointed to the clouds

Fiction Contest!

and said. “It looks like you.” She pointed to the clouds and said. “It looks like you.” She
pointed to the clouds and said. “It looks like you.” She pointed to the clouds and said.

$2,000 in prize money

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to the clouds and said. “It looks like you.” She pointed to the clouds and said. “It looks

First Place: $1,250

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Second Place: $500 • Third Place: $250
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Courier“It
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also call our main switchboard (604.738.1412) and request a form by fax or download at www.vancourier.com

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pointed to the clouds and said. “It looks like you.” She pointed to the clouds and said.
“It Sponsored
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Original
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returned. like
The Vancouver
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will be accepting
entries on
24, 2011
from 8:30am
Entry

10219100

fee is $15 cash. The Vancouver Courier retains ﬁrst publishing rights and winning entries will be posted online and published in The Vancouver Courier on
successive
Fridays startingto
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the Contest Period. Winners must correctly answer a time-limited skill-testing question. Winners will be selected Nov. 16 2011 in Vancouver, BC. There
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Build up the person. Build up the community.
uwlm.ca

3774-0911

3

1

4

1. It seems like it was only yesterday that Death Cab for Cutie was wearing
sloppy T-shirts and playing to 100 equally sloppy people at the Starﬁsh
Room. Now the Paciﬁc Northwest band is headlining Rogers Arena Oct. 21,
frontman Ben Gibbard is married to actress Zooey Deschanel and the band
looks like proprietors of a hip new Prohibition-inspired bar/deli/butchershop/
haberdashery in Gastown. Who knew? The always rockin’ Hold Steady opens.
Tickets at Red Cat, Zulu Records and all Ticketmaster locations.

2

2. Vancouver Opera kicks off its new season by easing up on the opera and
going Broadway with its production of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.
The high-energy show, which premiered on Broadway in 1957 and was adapted
for ﬁlm in 1961, transplants the tale of Romeo and Juliet to 1950s New York
City, where the Sharks and the Jets are rival gangs who, conveniently enough,
are also great singers and dancers. It all goes down Oct. 22 to 29 at Queen
Elizabeth Theatre. For tickets, call 604-683-0222 or go to vancouveropera.ca.
3. Considering the current occupation of Wall Street, not to mention the
grounds of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Sean Devine’s new play Re:Union
seems particularly timely. Presented by Paciﬁc Theatre and Horseshoes &
Hand Grenades, Re:Union tells the story of Emily Morrison who returns to
where her father set ﬁre to himself in opposition of the Vietnam War and
wonders if she can continue his legacy of protest 36 years later. It runs Oct.
21 to Nov. 12 at Paciﬁc Theatre. For tickets and info, call 604-731-5518 or
go to paciﬁctheatre.org.

kudos & kvetches
Ship-eating grin

Canada’s most entertaining reality TV competition
since Battle of the Blades and Who Wants to Sleep
with Rex Murphy? has come to a climactic end.
On Wednesday, after much fanfare, the federal
government awarded $33-billion in government
shipbuilding contracts to two shipyards, one in
Halifax and one in North Vancouver.
It’s good news for North Vancouver’s Seaspan
Marine Corp., where an estimated $8-billion
contract is expected to create up to 4,000 jobs
in B.C. and with any luck a higher concentration
on our streets of grizzled scallywags, sea dogs
and men who talk in the pirate vernacular.
Not one to let a coattail go un-ridden or pass
up a photo-op, Premier Christy Clark beamed in
front of the cameras following the announcement.
“Eight billion dollars is huge,” said Clark. “At a
time like this, when the world is experiencing all
this economic uncertainty, it is going to be big.”
She then added, “And even though this is a
federal initiative that I had absolutely nothing to
do with, it’s important that it appears to voters
that I was somehow involved by posing in front
of cameras at announcements like this—and
it’s also why you will never see me within a 100
miles of a train track, train or train conductor

4. Headlines Theatre’s 30th year anniversary production Us and Them is
apparently inspired by the recent Stanley Cup riots, the London riots and
the Occupy Wall Street protests, and tackles a whole whack of social issues
from homophobia and immigration to poverty, religion and Roberto Luongo’s
inconsistent goaltending. We may have made that last one up. The “edgy, multilayered” play runs Oct. 21 to Nov. 12 at the Cultch. Tickets at thecultch.com.

once employed by the now defunct B.C. Rail…
Families ﬁrst! F-A-M-I-LY! Gooooo families!”

of dead dictators, graphic photos of busty
redheads and a healthy breakfast.

Dead, fed and red

Juiced up

While perusing the attention-deﬁcit-disorderfriendly website of one of Vancouver’s daily
newspapers over breakfast, we lost our appetite.
Splayed across the website’s homepage was a
grainy photo of a bloody, zombie-like, possibly
dead Moammar Gadhaﬁ who was killed Thursday.
As someone who has eaten cold pizza and
leftover Thai curry for breakfast on occasion, we
can honestly say that staring at photos of a dead
Libyan dictator is the least appetizing start to
our day we’ve experienced in some time.
Thankfully, the webpage was surrounded by a
beige coloured ad for McDonald’s new Fruit and
Maple Oatmeal. Not only that, but conveniently to
the right of the dead dictator porn was a sensitive
photo gallery of “Top 10 celebrity redheads,”
with a picture of an extremely busty Christina
Hendricks from the TV show Mad Men, who
apparently “brings a whole new meaning to the
phrase, ‘red-hot ginger.’” We didn’t even know
“red-hot ginger” was a phrase in the ﬁrst place.
We guess that’s what’s called in the news
biz “balanced coverage.” Graphic photos

A33

arts & entertainment

Picks of the week

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011 THE VANCOUVER COURIER

A group of local artists, comedians, ﬁlmmakers,
writers and graphic artists have joined forces
to support Mayor Gregor Robertson and his
Vision Vancouver team as they ride their bikes
and human-sized transport chickens conﬁdently
towards the municipal election on Nov. 19. The
group, who were also behind the Sh** Harper
Did website during the federal election, recently
launched WeBackTheJuiceMan.com—a reference
to the mayor’s Happy Planet juice business, not
his brief dalliance with anabolic steroids while
playing professional baseball in the mid-’90s.
The website also showcases new T-shirts
produced by the Cause+Affect and Welcome to
Eastvan peeps that list the last names of Vision
candidates in Helvetica font. There’s even a picture
of Robertson’s head photoshopped onto Canuck
Ryan Kesler’s naked body from his recent ESPN
Magazine photo shoot, with the caption: “Gregor—
He’s like the Kesler of Mayors.” Personally, we
always thought he was more the Henrik Sedin of
mayors—cute, quiet, difﬁcult to understand and
protected by an inner sanctum of thugs. Oh snap.

“When I had my stomach removed five
months ago for cancer, I was unable to
eat, digest any food properly and I was a
total wreck. Thanks to you for developing
a treatment plan I am now free of any
symptoms and have never felt better!”

Here’s a thought. If we can learn to
correctly pronounce “Gewurztraminer,” “Cabernet Sauvignon” and “Riesling,” then it shouldn’t take much to
wrap our tongues around “Kretikos,”
“Nemea” and the slightly more challenging “Moschoﬁlero”—pronounced
like the Russian capital.
It’s only a matter of practise. And
our hunch is that with bargains to
spare and improving quality, there’s
untapped interest in Greek wines.
If you’re thinking Retsina, don’t
even go there. Today’s Greek wines
are a far cry from the “acquired taste”
of those long ago, pine-resin-fuelled
nights at Orestes, when it was the
hottest ticket in town.
When Christina Boutari, whose
forebears founded the Boutari Winery
in Naoussa in 1879, whipped through
Vancouver last week, we caught up
with her at waterside Nu Aegean,
for a brief but rewarding tasting that
served as a worthy reminder in these
wallet-weary times.
But there’s more to it than that.
While these wines are unique, they’re
far from esoteric. There’s also a romantic, historic connection, in that
they come from the cradle of winemaking, from where vines made their
way around the world.
Dig around the eastern Mediterranean section of B.C. Liquor Stores
(somewhat ignominiously between
Italy and Bulgaria) and you will ﬁnd
at least a couple of these value drops.
• 2009 Boutari Kretikos sports ﬂoral and stonefruit aromas with a crisp

(Left) Dig around the eastern Mediterranean section of B.C. liquor
stores and you’ll be pleasantly surprised. (Right) The unsung kitchen at
photos Tim Pawsey
the Railway Club has a deal of a lunch.
but surprisingly generous palate with
vibrant acidity, clove and citrus notes.
The name refers to Crete, where it
comes from there, and it can also
mean a table wine—and it’s made
with indigenous grapes that you don’t
need to know how to pronounce. A
great food wine. Think oysters, calamari or grilled chicken. $12.99.
• 2009 Boutari Moschoﬁlero. You’ll
have to look hard to ﬁnd a more interesting wine for this price. Slightly aromatic and ﬂoral, look for stonefruit,
crisp acidity and citrus notes with
gentle spice and earthy undertones
before a lengthy close. Appealingly
low alcohol—and highly awarded.
Try it with Dungeness crab and lemon
butter. $15.95.
• 2008 Boutari Naoussa. From the
original winery. Like many valuepriced wines, stick it in a big glass and
you’ll be surprised. It might even have
you thinking about Gamay or Tempra-

nillo. Cherry and ﬂoral on top, medium bodied, cherry and chocolate notes
with easy tannins and good structure
and spicy earthy tones that could have
you turning to barbecued chicken or,
ideally, grilled lamb chops. $15.99.
•••
Faster than you can say “Souvlaki,”
Harry Kambolis has opened another Nu
Greek bare bones eatery, this time at 1513
West Broadway and Granville. Grab any
one of the above and head home with
some excellent Greek take-out.
•••
Lunch deal of the week: Upstairs
and unsung, the Railway Club (579
Dunsmuir St., 604-681-1525) offers a
lunchtime haven from noon to 2 p.m.
with decent pints in one of Vancouver’s
rare remaining true pub settings. Go for
the salmon burger with the works ($10)
and a pint of Driftwood Fat Tug IPA—or
any one from a raft of worthy taps.
info@hiredbelly.com

“Steel” and “magnolias” aptly describe the
southern belles who come together in Truvy’s
House of Beauty, the best place in smalltown
Chinquapin, Louisiana to get your hair done.
They’re as southern as big ol’ magnolias and
mint juleps. When they call someone “Honey,” it’s as warm and sticky as the real thing
on a hot day. But when the going gets tough,
their resolve is as steely as Scarlett O’Hara’s.
And things do get tough in Robert Harling’s
Steel Magnolias, which was adapted into
1989 movie starring Shirley MacLaine and
Julia Roberts, among others. What begins as
a lightweight look at women gossiping about
their lives while Truvy applies the curlers becomes a group of strong women supporting
another when disaster strikes.

“There’s no such thing as natural beauty,”
claims eternally optimistic Truvy (Dolores
Drake), and that keeps Clairee (Norma Bowen), Ouiser (Anna Hagan) and M’Lynn (Erin
Ormond) coming back on a regular basis.
M’Lynn’s daughter Shelby (Susan Coodin)
probably isn’t a regular but she’s getting married today and wants her hair done up for the
occasion. You get the feeling these women
have known each other all their lives.
As the play starts, Truvy has just hired Annelle ((Sarah Carle) to help out in the beauty
parlour. Carle’s Annelle is clumsy and awkward, squinting through her big glasses and
scrunching up her face when she’s bewildered—which seems to be most of the time.
Bowen’s Clairee is a matron of strong
opinions who provides, late in the play and
hilariously—exactly what is needed to lift
everyone’s spirits. Anna Hagan’s Ouiser
is rich and scratchy, a classy dresser with
ﬂaming orange, out-of-the-bottle hair.
Clairee and Ouiser’s tell-it-like-it-is abrasiveness is in counterpoint to M’Lynn’s cool reserve

Dolores Drake, Sarah Carle and Susan Coodin
appear in Steel Magnolias.
and Shelby’s excited girlishness. Ormond and
Coodin show a mother/daughter relationship
that’s almost too sweet to be true—but Shelby’s
diabetes and single child status has, no doubt,
forged a bond stronger than most. Ormond carries her cool to the breaking point and that’s
when those southern belles get to work.
Production values are good with a late’80s salon complete with styling chairs

and a shampoo station. Harling’s snappy
dialogue encourages us to like and admire
these women. And Shelby’s struggle with
diabetes elicits our sympathy. The play’s
weak point is that Harling goes on a bit;
while it’s entertaining, there’s a lot of ﬁller. Director Nicola Cavendish keeps things
moving along but can’t conceal the fact that
there is not enough dialogue—albeit funny
and charming—to advance the plot.
I can only imagine how much fun rehearsals were for Cavendish and cast. Seven funny, articulate, talented women in one
room. There would have been side-splitting
laughter and maybe tears. For Cavendish,
who, like Shelby, is a diabetic, it must have
been particularly poignant.
This Chemainus Theatre Festival production
entertained audiences on Vancouver Island all
summer long before moving to Richmond’s
Gateway Theatre where it continues to please
audiences. Served up with a shot of southern
comfort, it’s all about the power of friendship.
joled@telus.net

Paranormal Activity 3 stands all on its own
in the pre-Halloween horror lineup, other
studios apparently having decided that
they might as well wave the white sheet
now rather than compete with the wildly
successful phenomenon.
We all know the story of how Oren Peli’s
ﬁlm, made for an enviously low $15,000,
went on to make more than $193 million
worldwide. The sequel, thanks to pre-release buzz, eventually earned $177 million,
though the production budget was upped to
$3 million. (Presumably, this was due to the
high cost of renting a baby and future therapy for the toddler, who was dragged across
and out of his crib by unseen forces.)
Paranormal Activity 3 is poised to make
an equally big dent in the pre-holiday box
ofﬁce, thanks to studio hype: Vancouver
was one of the select cities chosen to preview the ﬁlm earlier in the week, after a
tweet-fest orchestrated by Paramount. The
third ﬁlm comes out almost a year to the
day of the second, which came out only 13
months after the ﬁrst. (If it ain’t broke, keep
churning them out as fast as you can.)
Filmmakers cleverly intertwine all three
ﬁlms to make the audience curious about
what happens next (or in this case, what
happened ﬁrst). New fans will certainly
pick up Paranormal 1 and 2 to get the

thread of the story, though the ﬁlms stand
well on their own.
This ﬁlm may give parents greater nightmares than teen viewers, as it all stems
from an imaginary friend who turns out to
be frighteningly real. The ﬁlm goes back to
1988, during Katie and Kristi’s childhood,
early days in the haunting that would
prove to be their ruin years later. After un-

long, sleep-deprived, caffeine-fuelled, gore-splattered weekend of
do-it-yourself movie making in
which contestants write, shoot,
edit and complete a seven-minute
short horror ﬁlm in 48 hours.
Each team will receive a random horror subgenre and weapon, as well as a line of dialogue
and prop common to all teams.
The completed ﬁlms must be

BIKE
TO
WORK
WEEK

JOIN US AT
BIKETOWORKMETROVAN.CA
OCT 31–NOV 6, 2011

explained thumps and knocking in their
suburban home, and claims of a ghostly
presence by the girls, Dennis (Christopher
Nicholas Smith) tries to investigate the
source by installing video cameras around
his home (he’s a wedding videographer,
which explains all the fancy equipment).
The found footage technique is a good
one, though we no longer worry about the

handed in by 7 p.m. on Sunday,
Oct. 23.
The ﬁnished results will then
be posted online and shown at
a public screening presented by
the Celluloid Social Club, Oct.
27, 7:30 p.m. at the Rio Theatre,
where the ﬁlms will be voted on
by both the audience and an inperson jury. This year’s Grand
Prize judge is Larry Fessenden

(Habit, Wendigo, House of the
Devil, I Sell the Dead). Prizes will
also be awarded for Best Script,
Best Acting, Best Death, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction,
Best Costumes, Best Makeup/Effects, Best Use of Prop or Dialogue and Most Subversive Use of
Genre.
Last year’s Bloodshots winner,
The Provider, directed by Brianne

A PULSE-RACING

“

THRILLER.

”

– Peter Travers

“GRIPPING

AND

PROVOCATIVE”

– Owen Gleiberman

COARSE
LANGUAGE

GOLD

Facebook.com/AllianceFilms
SILVER

Nord-Stewart, co-written by Andy
Thompson and starring Gabrielle
Rose, screened at the most recent
Vancouver International Film Festival as well as the 2011 Cannes
Short Film Corner, where it received a “Coup de Coeur” distinction as one of the best shorts from
Canada.
For more information, go to
celluloidsocialclub.com.

BRONZE

NOW PLAYING

TheIdesOfMarch.ca

YouTube.com/AllianceFilms

1:45, 4:00, 7:00, 9:15

www.festivalcinemas.ca

FESTIVAL CINEMAS

PARK THEATRE

3440 CAMBIE STREET • 709-3456

Check out Alliance’s new home on Moviefone.ca for all the latest news on
our movies in theatres and at home. Visit moviefone.com/alliance-movie-trailers
FACEBOOK.COM/ALLIANCEFILMS

YOUTUBE.COM/ALLIANCEFILMS

10212593

Blood-ﬁlled weekend

This weekend, the streets of Vancouver will be ﬁlled with blood,
mayhem and, with any luck, a few
possessed children as the eighth
annual Bloodshots 48-Hour Horror Filmmaking Challenge gets
underway.
Tonight (Oct. 21) at 7 p.m., 25
brave teams will convene at the
ANZA Club for what will be one

Paranormal Activity 3 creeps into theatres this week.

characters the same way we wondered about
those poor people in The Blair Witch Project,
back in 1999. Since then, Cloverﬁeld, the
Paranormal ﬁlms, The Last Exorcism, George
A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, Quarantine
(and its Spanish parent [rec]) have all employed the technique successfully.
Anticipation is a rare thing these days:
there’s something about not quite seeing what’s going on just beyond the frame
that’s terrifying. And it requires us to use
our imagination, a tool we should all air out
every once in a while. Filmmakers utilize
the power of suggestion to full effect, aided
by the feel of low-def ’80s ﬁlm footage.
This time around, Henry Joost and Ariel
Schulman direct, replacing Tod Williams,
who took over from creator Peli (producer
on this third instalment). Joost and Schulman are a good choice, having created a
stir with their pseudo-documentary Catﬁsh,
about the perils of Facebook. So the guys
in charge have toed the line of reality and
fakery before. Plus, now that we’re (pretty)
sure the Paranormal footage wasn’t actually found, the formula could get stagnant:
new blood is vital.
If you’ve seen the other ﬁlms, you know
the source of the haunting. By rationing
the family history, per ﬁlm, ﬁlmmakers
have left room for both prequels and sequels: Don’t be surprised if a Paranormal 4
appears this time next year.
jcrawfordﬁlm@gmail.com

A38

THE VANCOUVER COURIER FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011

Since 1994, Nite of Hope founder Judi Miller, with
North Shore ﬁreman Rod Boniface, has seen $2million raised for breast cancer research.

President Karimah Es Sabar and president and
executive director Eyob G. Naizghi hosted a
showcase of cultures at Festival MOSAIC.

Fred
MuchMusic and We Day host Jesse Giddings
attended the Toy Watch for Haiti event at the
Shangri-la’s Xi Shi Lounge.

UNLEESHED

At Arts Umbrella’s Splash shindig, auctioneer Barry
Scott fetched the night’s top bid of $38,000 for a
Gordon Smith painting.

Swish splash: Arts Umbrella’s Splash soiree once again
boasted an impressive collection of art and attendees for
the annual art auction gala chaired by former city councilor Kim Capri. Auctioneer Barry Scott got $300,000 from
50 pieces in the live auction. A painting by West Vancouver
artist Gordon Smith fetched the night’s top bid of $38,000.
Wild West: Yours truly along with Ian Hanomansing took a
Walk on the Wild Side, hosting and playing auctioneers at
Westside Family Place’s African Safari-themed shindig. A Gotham Steakhouse dinner for 12 went for $5,300 contributing
to the $30,000 raised for the Kitsilano family resource centre.
Naughty and Nite: CTV’s Rebecca Hall, Jason Pires and
gala chair Pamela Buck fronted the Moulin Rouge-themed
Nite of Hope beneﬁtting the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. Founder Judi Miller welcomed a capacity crowd to
the Parisian party held at the Pinnacle Hotel.
We children: While headliners Mikhail Gorbachev and
Shaquille O’Neal headed to the Segals home for a late
night nosh, MusicMusic and We Day host Jesse Giddings
made a cameo at the Toy Watch for Haiti event at Shangri-la’s newly launched Xi Shi Lounge. Grammy producer
Chin Injeti, Sophia Danai and Omar Khan performed at the
Italian watchmaker’s Free the Children beneﬁt.
Hear Fred Mondays 8:20 a.m. on CBC Radio’s The Early
Edition; email Fred at yvrﬂee@hotmail.com; follow Fred on
Twitter: @FredAboutTown or fredabouttown.blogspot.com.

CEO Lucille Pacey and Splash gala producer
Jennifer Petersen were all smiles as they witnessed
$300,000 generated for Arts Umbrella.

Executive director Diane Ash and director of
development Kelly Ryan saw $30,000 raised at their
Walk on the Wild Side soiree.

Jacky Essombe’s African music and dance headlined
Festival Mosaic and Westside Family Place
fundraisers.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011 THE VANCOUVER COURIER

Runner has yoga on her mind

Jock and Jill

with Megan Stewart

Women-less footie

Vancouver street soccer
players—the
unrestricted
athletes who bring their
panache and personalized
style to unlined parks, gymnasiums and backyard laneways—will recognize Vancouver in the upcoming FIFA
Street, created by Electronic
Arts and available for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
But women won’t see themselves on-screen as avatars.
The game, due out in March,
will not include female players because the added cost to
shape their bodies and model
movement and clothing didn’t
provide enough return on investment. The time-consuming
animation involved in modelling the female form—breasts,
hips, and a smaller frame in
motion—was considered too
pricey.
The game’s creative director
said female avatars were on the
wish list and will be considered
in the future.
In September, EA added a
female avatar to its hugely popular NHL 12, drawing on the
likeness of the 14-year-old girl
who asked the company why
a team couldn’t include her female hockey heroes.
I can’t help but see the
missed opportunity, not just in
FIFA Street but any sport-based
video game that displays exceptional life-like details and has
the ability to elevate the status
of sports stars and national role
models while still afﬁrming
women’s athletic abilities and
potentially drawing more girls
to sport.
The MLS may not have a
women’s league, but many
teams, including the Vancouver Whitecaps, support and
fund a women’s roster that
competes in a semi-professional league. Canada will host the
Women’s World Cup in 2015.
And, although the street game
that inspired FIFA Street is distinct from the homeless soccer
movement, the World Cup of
Homeless Soccer opened to
national women’s teams three
years ago. The Canadian women are competitive.
Read more online at vancourier.com.

Megan Stewart

Staff writer

Nearing the 30-kilometre mark of the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon last
Sunday, Katherine Moore repeated the
phrase, “I am tough as nails.”
As the fastest Canadian woman in
the 2010 race, Moore was aiming to defend her title and run a personal best.
Her speed put her on pace to better
her 2010 time of two hours, 47 minutes and 43 seconds. This year, she
reached 30 km in 1:57.59, nearly one
minute faster than the previous year.
“I felt really good,” she said this
week from her Yaletown home. She
ﬁnished 63rd out of a ﬁeld of thousands, was the eighth woman to cross
the ﬁnish line and repeated as the
fastest Canadian woman.
But Moore didn’t run a personal best
and ﬁnished a minute slower than her
2010 time, clocking in at 2:48.47.
The Toronto weather slowed her
down. “It was extremely windy and
cold,” she said, noting the marathon
date shifted from September to midOctober and the start time was moved
back two hours to 9 a.m.
“It was so windy the last seven kilometres, I was actually feeling as if
I was being pushed backward. When
you’re tired like that, it was extremely
painful. I pretty much just held on and
just wanted to get to the ﬁnish line.”
Moore, 33, who picked up long-distance running six years ago, tapped
into a resolve and inner calm she’d
developed through years of yoga. The
practice is also one she teaches in her
Running into Yoga workshops and hot
yoga classes through Y Yoga, which
are popular with athletes.
With 12 km until the end of the
marathon, Moore pushed on.
“I changed my mind and any pain
that I felt, I just started to think very
positively, [saying] very positive mantras and afﬁrmations to myself.”
She reminded herself that a competitive 42-km road race is something she
enjoys, and said she had to “just know
that I wanted to be there and try to enjoy the atmosphere, the energy when
you’re really hurt and struggling.”
Moore’s self-talk became speciﬁc.
“When I start to hurt, I just focus on
‘relax,’ or I’ll repeat the word ‘breathe’
just to take deep breaths.”
Runners have much to learn from
yoga, said Moore, although the two
pursuits are at odds from one another.
“Running is completely the opposite
of yoga. Running, you’re contracting
the muscle, it’s a strenuous activity,
it’s a demand on the body. Yoga counter-balances that, it’s more relaxing,
lengthening the muscles, quieting the
mind,” she said.

p39 ffinal colour
Eas
y
and
Sec
ure

sports & recreation

Marathoner uses and teaches yoga to quiet the mind

A39

Katherine Moore was the fastest Canadian woman at last Sunday’s
photo Jason Lang
Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon.
“I ﬁnd the focus you get in yoga,
learning just to focus your attention
and try to clear out a lot of the chatter
in the in mind, helps when things get
really tough in a race or in training.”
Moore’s Colorado-based coach,
Olympic marathoner Kathy Butler, said
each runner is different but all can
beneﬁt from yoga. In Moore’s case, she
was already practising yoga when she
returned to competitive running.
“If someone has been running
for 20 years but never done yoga,
it would make more sense to take a
more cautious approach to yoga and
running,” Butler wrote in an email.
“I still think it can be very beneﬁcial,
especially if it is somewhat targeted
to athletes or runners or at least approached with those weaknesses and
strengths in mind.”
Stretching is good for the body and
is calming for the mind, said Butler,
who credited Moore’s professionalism
and dedication.

IS A Click AWAY

“The training leading up to a marathon is the best way to prepare yourself physically, but I think it also gave
Katherine the conﬁdence to know she
was in good shape and could push
through the rough patches of the race,”
she said. “With a little less wind, she
was in shape to take a decent chunk
off her previous best marathon.”
Moore is sponsored by Saucony and
believes the marathon has shifted, in
part, from an extreme sport for a small
number of athletes into a mass-participation event out of the desire for a personal sense of accomplishment.
“Running in itself has become much
more popular. People love the challenge
[…] to get out there and participate.”
Moore will race shorter distance
races next season, including the James
Cunningham Seawall Race in February,
the Vancouver Sun Run and possibly
the BMO Vancouver Half Marathon.
mstewart@vancourier.com
Twitter: @MHStewart

Trees are a signiﬁcant cause of power interruptions. Contact between trees
and power lines can also create a severe danger.
Over the next few months we will be pruning and removing trees in the V5N
Boundaries:
North - South: East 1st Avenue to East 33rd Avenue
East - West:
Nanaimo Street to Clark Street

3184

Postal Code area of Vancouver.

Trees are pruned using the best arboriculture (tree care) practices. Skilled
workers employed by BC Hydro are trained in both electrical safety and tree
care. Only correct and proper techniques are used to eliminate any safety
hazards.
For more information about our current work or other vegetation
management practices, please call Mike Chadwick, your area coordinator of
Vegetation Maintenance, at 604 528 3297.

For 50 years, BC Hydro has been providing clean, reliable electricity to our customers.
Today we are planning for the next 50 years by investing in new projects, upgrading
existing facilities and working with our customers to conserve energy through
Power Smart.
Learn more at bchydro.com/regeneration50

Visit or call our pharmacy to book your appointment
with a London Drugs Certified Injection Pharmacist.
Some exceptions may apply. Please speak to our pharmacist for more details.
We can also administer immunizations such as Hepatitis A/B, Shingles
and Tetanus. A nominal injection fee will be charged.

There is no sugar coating it. Cold, wet and
muddy is what you can expect from winter
rides. That’s the reality.
Yes, it will be dark when you wake up
and it’s bound to be so cold and nasty that
the weatherman is telling you it’s a good
day to watch movies on the couch. There
isn’t anything fun about preparing for a
winter ride. But, once you make the effort
to buy the right clothes and get yourself
out the door, you will be glad you did.
Group riding in the winter not only has
great training beneﬁts, it provides a feeling
of camaraderie that you don’t get from a
summer ride. Maybe it’s the misery-lovescompany phenomena or maybe it’s because
those of us who decide to ride together in the
pouring rain must really love riding.
Whatever it is, once you invest in the
proper clothing and force your bike out the
door, the feeling you get when you roll back
home is a huge sense of accomplishment.
Riding in harsh weather can also provide
a mental edge, which will help you later
in the racing season. You can’t choose the
weather on race day, so if you can brave
the elements on a training day, you can always look back and say, “At least it wasn’t
as bad as that day!”

Here’s a list of the must-haves to enjoy
winter riding:
• Fenders with back extensions
• Booties for your shoes and/or plastic
bags on your feet, inside your shoes
• Full-ﬁnger gloves
• Light toque, head band or cap for under your helmet
• Clear or transition sunglasses
• Water resistant (not waterproof unless
excellent quality) rain jacket
• Tights and bike shorts
• Breathable, rain-resistant light layers
The key to the right clothing is not to
stay dry, but to stay warm.
After taking all this time to plug winter
riding, there’s always an exception when
it might be best to stay home. Since Vancouver is one of the few cities in Canada
where you can ride almost all year round,
it means that some die-hard cyclists will
miss out on the off-season, which I spoke
about in a column last month.
Missing your recovery phase means your
body doesn’t get a chance to heal. Over
training, adrenal fatigue, frequent illness
and poor performance is sure to follow.
So if you are still in the recovery phase of
training and reading this with jealousy or
guilt—stop worrying. Enjoy your rest time,
sleep in and watch movies on the couch.
The rain will still be here in January
when you are ready to start training again.
See you on the road.
Kristina Bangma is a coach, personal trainer and writer with a love of riding and racing.
Email questions to kris@getﬁtwithkris.com.

Don’t Even Think Of Selling Your
Home Until You Attend The
Free Homesellers Class
What You Learn Could Save You Thousands!
Vancouver, B.C. - This free class is being
offered to anyone thinking of selling their
home.The class is a free community service
program designed to help you answer all
your questions about homeselling including
when is the best time to sell? What can I do
to ensure my home sells for top dollar? How
long does the whole process take? What
questions should I ask any realtor before
working with them? How does the whole
process work? It can be overwhelming to
say the least!
This free 2 hour homeseller class is
packed full of all the information you need
to know - information that could save
you thousands of dollars. Top industry
professionals will share insider secrets
that could save you time and money and
make the entire process easier and less
stressful.
Some topics covered in the class:
• getting top dollar in today’s
market

• 27 free & easy ﬁx ups to sell your
home for top dollar
• 10 questions to ask any realtor
before working with them
• the 9 dumbest mistakes smart
people make when selling their
home
• what is home staging and how
can it help me sell for thousands
more
If you are thinking of selling your home
and would like to attend this free class just
call 1-888-765-5426 ext. 2 for a free 24
hour recorded message.
This two hour educational class has
helped many homesellers save time and
money with a lot less stress.
The class will be held at Vancouver Public
Library, Thursday, October 27th, 6:309:00pm. Seating is limited and reservations
are required. Call 1-888-765-5426 ext. 2
today to reserve your free seats!

Sponsored by Ken Chouinard - Remax Progroup

10214116

A40

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011 THE VANCOUVER COURIER

A41

sports & recreation

Move from old rink to new eight sheets at Hillcrest Centre the reason for surge

Olympic curling rink sees spike in membership
Eight sheets of ice and a new
home in the former Olympic
curling venue at Hillcrest Centre have brought a surge of
interest and hundreds of new
members to the Vancouver
Curling Club.
Club president Scott Allen said the move from the
six-decade old rink with ﬁve
sheets of ice at the Riley Park
Community Centre meant a
majority of leagues have expanded. Club members ﬁrst

toured the rink in September
and pre-season clinics started
later that month. “Membership has increased. Almost all
of our evening leagues have
grown—some a little bit and
some substantially,” he said.
Exact membership numbers
will be tallied next month but,
said Allen, “As of right now,
our estimate is that we will be
over 1,000. Last year we were
just under 850.”
The competitive teams curling during the Thursday Open
include new players to junior,
provincial and world cham-

Donations of clean used, good quality clothing,
household goods and furniture, jewellery and
books can be dropped off at the shop during
business hours. To arrange pick up of donations
or to volunteer at the shop call

604.568.5744

pion curlers. That league has
grown from 24 to 36 teams
since the Vancouver Curling
Club, established nearly 100
years ago in 1912, set up this
fall in Hillcrest.
The enormously popular
Paciﬁc Rim, an all-inclusive
league open to gay, lesbian,
bisexual and transgender curlers and their supporters, now
counts 48 teams. “It must be
one of the biggest leagues
around,” said Allen.
The Vancouver CurlPLEASE READ THE FINE PRINT: *2011 Tacoma up to $4000 cash back; valid on 4x4 models only; $3000 in customer cash incentive & $1000 in non-stackable cash for a total discount of $4000. **2011 Venza up to $4000 cash back; is on FWD models only. Receive $500 in customer cash incentive & $3500 in non-stackable cash for a total discount of $4000. ***2011
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apply; offers are time limited and may change without notice. Dealer may lease/sell for less. In the event of any discrepancy or inconsistency between Toyota prices, rates and/or other information contained in this advertisement (or on toyotabc.ca) and that contained on toyota.ca, the latter shall prevail. Errors and omissions excepted

Megan Stewart
Staff writer

ing Club has high school
leagues, a league for visually
impaired curlers, for couples,
women or men only, seniors
and novices.
The sport can be competitive and bonspiels are organized through the year, but
many leagues draw participants because curling lends
itself so well to socializing.
“You can get a physical work
out, there are some great tactical strategies and thinking that
are required when you’re on

the ice, and one of the most
important parts is the social
aspect both on the ice and after in the lounge,” said Allen,
who was involved with the
city’s bid for the 2010 Games.
“And at the end of the day,
it’s a relatively inexpensive
sport.”
Membership is $30 annually and league fees range from
$200 to $300 a year.
To celebrate the grand opening of Hillcrest Oct. 29 from 11
a.m. to 3 p.m., the Vancouver

2011

deals that

TACOMA

4000
CASH BACK
CK

$

Curling Club hosts free coaching clinics for members and
non-members as well as the
Capital One Rocks and Rings,
an event held on carpet to introduce kids to curling.
The Brier Cup—the Stanley
Cup of men’s curling in Canada—and the Continental Cup
will be on hand in addition to
music, dancing and more. For
more information, visit vancurl.com.
mstewart@vancourier.com
Twitter: @MHStewart

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
Tuesday, November 22nd 2011 @ 7:00 p.m.
ITEMS ON THE AGENDA
ELECTION OF THE BOARD

@

1205

OWNER OPERATORS

KENSINGTON COMMUNITY CENTRE ASSOCIATION

Place ads online @
VanCourier.com

remembering.ca

EMPLOYMENT

Needed immediately for local
transport company, for Lower
Mainland deliveries. Should be
ﬂuent in English. Minimum of 1
year experience is required.

Announcements

As stated in the Kensington Community Centre Association By Laws,
to vote you must be a member in good standing. In order to run for
election you must be a member in good standing for a minimum of
90 days prior to the election, in addition to run for Executive office you
must submit in writing your letter of intent to the Nomination
committee 30 days prior to the Annual Meeting (October 22nd 2011).
Kensington Community Centre on strong community involvement to
meet the needs and interests of the local people it serves.
FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:
BRAD TAMPLIN, President at the Association office: 604 718 5863
KENSINGTON COMMUNITY CENTRE
5175 Dumfries Street, Vancouver V5P 3A2
604 718 6201

SCHOOL DISTRICT NO.71
(COMOX VALLEY)
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
Effective January 1, 2012
Reporting to the Secretary
Treasurer (CFO), the Director of
Operations is a member of the
district management team and is
responsible for the smooth
operation and maintenance of all
school district facilities.
Qualified individuals are invited to
apply in confidence by submitting
a cover letter, chronological
resume and the name, phone
number/ email address of three
professional references through
www.makeafuture.ca by 4:00p.m.
PST on November 4th, 2011.
XSTRATA COPPER currently
has openings for Development
Miners at our Kidd Mine site in
Timmins, Ontario. Please fax your
resume to: 1-866-382-2296 or call
312-264-9805 (Chris), Email:
christopher.may@personified.com
for information.

Covenant House
Vancouver
is hiring casual

• Front Desk Clerks
• Food Service
Workers
• Cooks
Check out:

www.covenanthousebc.org
or fax your resume to:

1-888-744-4493
TODAY!

1245

Health Care

CLERICAL POSITION

We are going paperless! We
need someone to scan our
office’s medical records, in
confidence, into a computer
system.
We have 2 temporary F/T
positions at our Vancouver &
Surrey offices. Computer
skills are needed. Any medical
or ophthalmology experience
is an asset. Send resume to:

Healthcare providers are one of the hottest career opportunities available.
Practical Nursing is one of the fastest growing segments in healthcare.
Train locally for the skills necessary in this career ﬁeld

• HEALTHCARE ASSISTANT: Healthcare Assistants are prepared to

work in both healthcare facilities and community agencies. HCA’s provide &
maintain the health, safety, independence, comfort & well-being of individuals
& families. Train locally for the skills necessary in this rewarding career
ﬁeld.

• PAYROLL ADMINISTRATOR: Payroll Administrators are speciﬁcally

concerned with employees pay & beneﬁts. They also prepare & check
statements of earnings and provide information to employees on payroll,
beneﬁt plans and collective agreement terms. Train locally for the skills
necessary in this competitive career ﬁeld.

JOIN US ON:
Vancouver Campus:

604-683-7400
604-251-4473

East Vancouver Campus:

www.sprottshaw.com

Call 604-708-2628
www.plea.ca

CLINICAL RESEARCH
Position Available
At Ophthalmology Office
Full-Time or Part-Time at
UBC’s Vancouver General
Hospital location for Dept of
Ophthalmology. Flexible
hours. Experience in clinical
research in epidemiology and
publishing studies preferred.
Please send resume to:

The REACH dental Clinic is
looking for a casual dental
receptionist
with
a
comprehensive knowledge of the
Mercedes Power Practice
Program and 2-3 years
experience in a large dental
practice. This position includes
Saturday shifts and could lead to
a permanent position. Interested
candidates should submit their
resume by November 2, 2011 to
mmaceachern@reachcentre.bc.ca
or to 1145 Commercial Drive,
Vancouver, B.C. V5L 3X3. No phone
calls please.

canberra56@gmail.com

FEATURED EMPLOYMENT
JOB FAIR

• EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION: This ECE program will
help promote children’s healthy development, maximize quality of life,
assist families in their role as primary caregivers & support full participation
in community life. Train locally for the skills necessary in this rewarding
career ﬁeld.
• PRACTICAL NURSING: With the aging population, Healthcare &

Some great kids aged 12 to 18 who need
a stable, caring home for a few months.
Are you looking for the opportunity to
do meaningful, fulﬁlling work? PLEA
Community Services is looking for
qualiﬁed applicants who can provide
care for youth in their home on a
full-time basis or on weekends for respite.
Training, support and remuneration
are provided. Funding is available
for modiﬁcations to better equip your
home. A child at risk is waiting for an
open door. Make it yours.

TRAIN WITH BC’S LARGEST AND
MOST RESPECTED CAREER TRAINER!

shoppersdrugmart.ca/careers

1415

Music/Theatre/
Dance

Flute, Saxophone, Clarinet,
and Recorder. Lessons By exp’d
reg. music teacher 604-876-6861
www.rosscurran.com
IN HOME OR STUDIO LESSONS
Piano, Theory & other instruments.
Allegro Music School 604-327-7765

• Cashiers • Merchandisers • Pharmacy • Beauty
• Digital • Receivers • Post Office
Looking for a management position in British Columbia? Pop by for an
on-the-spot interview for qualified candidates.
Please bring a current resume including references. If you are unable to attend, please
apply to: asdm202@shoppersdrugmart.ca

EMPLOYMENT
1290

Sales

Head Office
Retail/Wholesale
Development
Representative
The incumbent is responsible
for the achievement of all
Confectionery category sales
and target objectives within
Head Office Retail &
Wholesale groups.
This channel coverage is
primarily based in Vancouver
with some moderate travel.
The position is ideal for a
entrepreneurial, high-energy,
creative professional who is
looking for opportunities to
further develop their dynamic
sales career with a National
Company.
All successful candidates
should have a University or
College degree in a business
related discipline.
Please forward Resume
and Cover Letter to
employment—cv
@hotmail.com

TRUTH IN
''EMPLOYMENT''
ADVERTISING
Postmedia Community
Publishing makes every
effort to ensure you are
responding to a reputable
and legitimate job
opportunity. If you suspect
that an ad to which you
have responded is
misleading, here are some
hints to remember.
Legitimate employers do
not ask for money as part of
the application process; do
not send money; do not give
any credit card information;
or call a 900 number in
order to respond to an
employment ad.
Job opportunity ads are
salary based and do not
require an investment.
If you have responded to an
ad which you believe to be
misleading please call the
Better Business Bureau at
604-682-2711, Monday to
Friday, 9am - 3pm or email
inquiries@bbbvan.org
and they will investigate.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011 THE VANCOUVER COURIER

3508
2015

Art &
Collectibles

MUST SELL 17 antique porcelaine dolls with original boxes from
Franklin Mint, must be seen
$35-$75 ea. Call 604-940-0106

Pen Delﬁn

Collection of 196 different
Pen Delﬁn pieces. Would like
to sell all together for $20,000
but will sell individual pieces.
Most pieces come with
original box. Please phone
604-467-8914.

Record Albums

300+ record albums in great
condition; mostly 50’s and
60’s music. Also many ‘78’s’
in book-like folders, as well as
original box sets and 8-tracks.
Offers. Call 604-316-1018.

We are looking for an energetic woman who is not afraid to
mop the ﬂoor, sit with a woman through a pelvic exam or argue
with a police ofﬁcer, sometimes all in the same day.
Visit us at: www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca for more info.
First Nations women and women of colour are encouraged to
apply. Closing Date: November 9th, 2011.

Enjoy Your Career and Have a Passion For What You Do!
We are holding a job fair for our NEW STORE at 3333 Main Street in Vancouver…

Why work here?
Our motto — Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet —
emphasizes our vision reaches beyond food retailing. Our
deepest purpose as an organization is helping support the
health, well-being, and healing of people, customers, team
members, and the planet.
We recruit the best people we can to become part of our
team. We empower them to make their own decisions,
creating a respectful workplace where people are treated
fairly and are highly motivated to succeed.
Are you passionate about food?

• Cashiers • Merchandisers • Pharmacy
• Beauty • Digital • Receivers
Looking for a management position in British Columbia? Pop by for an
on-the-spot interview for qualified candidates.
Please bring a current resume including references. If you are unable to attend, please
apply to: henrychhuang@gmail.com

NOTICE TO CREDITORS
AND OTHERS
Re: YEUK PING MA CHAN,
also known as YEUK PING
CHAN, YEUK PING MA,
YEUK PING CHAN MA,
CHAN MA YEUK PING,
CHAN YEUK PING MA and
MA YEUK PING CHAN,
Deceased, formerly of 207 3615 West 17th Avenue,
Vancouver, B.C. Creditors and
others having claims against
the Deceased, who died on
August 9, 2011, at Vancouver,
B.C. are required to send full
particulars of such claims to
the undersigned Executor at
#2700 - 700 West Georgia St.,
Vancouver, BC, V7Y 1B8,
on or before November 25,
2011, after which the estate’s
assets will be distributed,
having regard only to the
claims that have been
received.
Francis Wai Kong Chan,
Executor.
Alexander Holburn Beaudin &
Lang LLP, Solicitors.

NOTICE TO CREDITORS
AND OTHERS
Re: The Estate of ZEALA
SUTHERN, deceased.
Creditors and others having
claims against the Estate of
ZEALA SUTHERN are hereby
notified under Section 38 of the
Trustee Act that particulars of
their claim should be sent to the
Executor, Suite 356 - 5740
Cambie Street, Oakridge Plaza,
Vancouver, British Columbia, V5Z
3A6 on or before November 21,
2011, after which date the
Executor will distribute the estate
among the parties entitled to it,
having regard to the claims of
which the Executor then have
notice.
WILLIAM ROBERT OSTEN
Executor
OSTEN & OSTEN
Barristers and Solicitors
Suite 356 - 5740 Cambie Street
Vancouver, B.C. V5Z 3A6

NOTICE is hereby given that creditors and others having
claims against the Estate of JEAN HAMILTON BRAKENRIDGE,
Deceased, late of #117-2125 Eddington Drive, in the City of
Vancouver, in the Province of British Columbia, V6L 3A9, who died
on the 23rd day of May, 2011, are required to send full Particulars of such claims to the undersigned Executors, Nora parsons
and BMO trust Company, at 595 Burrard Street, 9th Floor, PO Box
49500, Vancouver, B.C., V7X 1L7, on or before the 22nd day of
November, 2011, after which date the estate will be distributed,
having regard only to claims that have been received.
NORA PARSONS BMO TRUST COMPANY
595 Burrard Street, 9th Floor P.O. Box 49500
Vancouver, BC V7X 1L7

Aries March 21 - April 19: A month of mysteries, depths,
secrets and hidden forces begins Sunday. Your subconscious
will burst to the surface, to heighten both your intuition and
your intimate desires. If you’re undisciplined, you could enter
an extramarital affair. Don’t confuse love and lust. This month
ahead holds a major change and/or opportunity for you, in
lifestyle and ﬁnances. These will demand commitment;
without it, success will dissolve. Tackle chores early Sunday.
Crucial relationships ﬁll the work week: be nimble, cooperative. Big success possible Friday. Love, law, learning
Saturday.
Taurus April 20-May 20: A month of work and drudgery
ends; a month of fresh horizons, opportunities, new sights
and exciting relationships begins. You might relocate; if so,
go big and far – and not before Nov. 10. Sunday’s romantic,
creative. OK, I lied: some work and drudgery remains,
Monday/Tuesday. Tackle it Tuesday for best results. Crucial
relationships spark Wednesday/Thursday – all’s good, but
temper or domestic tension could interfere Thursday eve
to Friday dawn. After this, Friday is packed with success
potentials in intimacy, investments, ﬁnances, health
– Saturday, too, but milder.
Gemini May 21-June 20: A month of work, drudgery,
some boredom, and caring for dependents starts now
(Sunday). Until Nov. 10, these duties can interfere with your
wanderlust, or with your need to read, learn and talk. (The
wanderlust, et al, is likely to win.) Be home, rest Sunday.
Romance lures Monday/Tuesday, but even Don Juan would
have difﬁculty with this one: go slow. That work begins in
earnest Wednesday/Thursday – but successfully, other than a
problem driving or communicating (especially late Thursday).
New people, new horizons and opportunities excite you
Friday/Saturday – chase them!

Cancer June 21-July 22: Sunday starts a month of
Libra Sept. 23-Oct. 22: The weeks ahead raise the money
pleasure, beauty, creativity, romance, self-expression and
stakes. As is usual for late October and November, you’re
love for children. You’ll ride a winning streak – a bigger one
favoured to chase money, seek a pay raise, enhance your
than usual, as social delights, popularity and wish fulﬁlment
earnings, buy and sell items, and deal with possessions. But
are added to the brew. Major stuff could happen! A co-worker
this year an added, deeper – and very lucky – level enters, so
romance is highlighted. Sunday’s for communications, travel
that possessions become investments, the search for added
and casual acquaintances. Rest Monday/Tuesday, make
income could lead to a lucrative business, the attempt to gain
sure your home/business are secure/grounded, and get your
new clients could produce a partnership, etc. One ﬂaw: until
beauty sleep. Wednesday/Thursday spark that romance,
Nov. 10, a partner or someone you really like socially could
pleasure, creativity, et al. Tackle chores – and social/romantic
interfere with, even ﬁght this, causing you to make a hard
joys – Friday onward.
choice. Tuesday to Saturday highlights all this.
Leo July 23-Aug. 22: The weeks ahead feature domestic
Scorpio Oct. 23-Nov. 21: Your hopes, sociability and
concerns, real estate, security, business territory, and the
popularity rise Sunday – the very day that kicks off a month
foundations or “what you stand on” in any area. (E.g., your
of increased energy, charisma, clout and effectiveness.
education is – usually – the foundation of your career.)
Use this month to the fullest, start important projects, seek
You might decide to abandon stale, useless projects or
favours – seize the day. A slowdown will begin November
relationships, and to “found” new ones. (This will lead
23, so don’t waste these intervening weeks. Use Monday/
to success, especially in ambitious areas.) Chase money
Tuesday to rest, plan, to ﬁnish up chores so they don’t
Sunday. News, details, errands, travel and casual friends
interfere with the future. Then charge forth Wednesday
ﬁll Monday/Tuesday. Midweek brings th ose domestic,
to Saturday. Some days bosses will be critical; other
foundational concerns. Don’t be overbearing (applies to middays (Saturday) co-operative. Sense their mood, then act
November). Romance winks Friday/Saturday!
accordingly. Big opportunities await!
Virgo Aug. 23-Sept. 22: Sunday kicks off a month of
Sagittarius Nov. 22-Dec. 21: Slow down. Sunday starts a
communications, details, paperwork, travel and errands,
month of quietude, rest, sweet solitude and contemplation.
news, casual acquaintances and siblings. This year these
Use these weeks to plan your future, to handle overdue
things (emails, calls, trips, news, etc.) can trigger, or entwine
tasks, to fulﬁll outstanding obligations, to interact with
with, some major projects in the same zones, but on a “larger
government and solve tax issues, to deal with charities,
stage.” E.g., communication becomes publishing, details
to be spiritual and reconnect with the living centre of
become profound ideas or higher learning, trips expand into
this world. If you do some of these things, you’ll emerge
international travel, casual friendship grows to love, etc.
refreshed and rejuvenated by late November. This inﬂuence
Wednesday to Friday brings clues – and opportunities. You
begins in earnest Wednesday/Thursday. A wish is denied
might give up one life philosophy, and embrace another,
Monday, but might come true, quietly, Tuesday. Your energy,
Adsthiscontinued
week to next June.
luck rise Friday/Saturday.
on next page

Call 604-630-3300
to place your ad

October 23 - 29, 2011
Capricorn Dec. 22-Jan. 19: Sunday begins a month of
happiness.popularity,social delights,ﬂirtations,entertainment
and wish fulﬁlment. You are undergoing the deepest change
of your life, from 2008 to 2023. The month ahead brings you
many clues about this change, its purpose and intended result.
Biggest clue: the change will bring about a revolution and
grand renewal in everything listed in the ﬁrst sentence. These
clues will be “lit up” by events, joy Wednesday/Thursday; by
“quiet knowing” Friday/Saturday. Until Nov. 10, avoid working
secretly toward your goals: it undercuts this ﬁne process.
Aquarius Jan. 20-Feb. 18: Sunday brings a month of
career and status ambitions, prestige relations, dealings with
bosses, parents and authorities. You’ll be under pressure, but
you’ll also have excellent opportunities to impress higherups, especially this Wednesday to Friday. You might be pulled
between two extremes: ambition and security, even between
ambition and the desire to quit. Truth is, the desire to quit
is luckier than ambition this year (to June 2012). Trying to
reconcile these opposites can make you quick-tempered
until Nov. 10. Step softly – luck is high. Joy, hope, Friday/
Saturday.
Pisces Feb. 19-March 20: The weeks ahead bring relief
in the form of gentle understanding, a mellow mood, wisdom
and a gentle, compassionate love. You might travel afar, deal
with foreign-born people, attend college, publish, meet a
“teacher,” or otherwise expand your views. Cultural rituals
arise – e.g., weddings, bat mitzvahs. Some of you will decide
to wed. These themes are highlighted Wednesday/Thursday,
and an event connected to them can come Friday – with an
exhilarating “uplift!” (Be ambitious Friday/Saturday; this will
cause the best to happen.) Earlier, embrace a challenging
person Sunday.
timstephens@shaw.ca

Going green in the lap of luxury
davidchao
The new MKZ Hybrid is
not just the ﬁrst hybrid
produced by Lincoln, it’s
the most fuel-efﬁcient luxury sedan you can buy in
Canada.
The MKZ Hybrid advances technology to a

higher level in many, many
ways, but I still have some
suggested improvements
(more on that later). My
fuel economy calculations
also didn’t quite match the
ofﬁcial ﬁgures put out by
Natural Resources Canada,
yet overall the MKZ Hybrid
turned out to be a very frugal fuel-user.
Certainly not your oldfashioned
big,
heavy,
chrome-decked
Lincoln,
the MKZ is a new and more
dynamic, direction for Lincoln, while still appealing
to traditional buyers. The
gas engine version of the
Lincoln MKZ received a
complete update last year,
with the hybrid added this
year. Based on the same

platform as Ford’s midsided family sedan, the Fusion, the MKZ is available
in both front-drive and allwheel-drive gas versions,
as well as the hybrid.
In its pure electric mode,
without the gas engine,
the MKZ Hybrid can reach
speeds of up to 75 km/h.
Yet, it’s the ﬂuid and ﬂawless way that this hybrid
system operates, as it dances between power sources
and power recovery, that’s
most impressive.
The gasoline engine is an
Atkinson cycle version of
the 2.5-litre four-cylinder
and it’s paired with a permanent-magnet AC electric
motor and an electronically-controlled continuously

variable (e-CVT) transmission.
While more fuel efﬁcient
than a conventional fourstroke engine, at low engine speeds an Atkinson
cycle engine produces less
torque. That, however, is
not a problem in a hybrid
system as the torque-rich
electric motor ﬁlls in as a
perfect power partner.
Taking full advantage of
the best qualities of each
power source is key to optimal hybrid performance,
as is the smooth transfer
between them. Lincoln
has done a masterful job
in both areas in the MKZ
Hybrid.
The MKZ Hybrid recovers almost 94 per cent of

energy when full regenerative braking is used. It’s actually a brake-by-wire system with simulated brake
actuation at the brake pedal and the pedal feel is just
like a conventional braking
system.
The Hybrid is priced
the same as the all-wheeldrive version of the MKZ
(at $42,200), and the frontdrive version is $38,400.
This also presents a
very clear, and interesting—cash, green or performance—choice for buyers.
THE LOOKS
Looking like a scaleddown version of Lincoln’s
ﬂagship full-sized luxury
sedan, the MKS, the MKZ
offers many of the features

and capabilities of the topline Lincoln sedan, albeit
in a more compact, fuel-efﬁcient and affordable package. As you’d expect, it has
iconic Lincoln design cues,
including the split-wing
grill and the Lincoln star
prominent front and back
and on the front quarter
panels.
And
yes,
there’s
chrome—on
the
door
handles, fog lamp bezels,
mouldings, mirrors and
exhaust tips, but it’s certainly not garish. My test
MKZ came with a 17-inch
chrome wheel option package ($1,100) that looked
very sharp, enhancing the
overall appearance.
Continued on next page

The tilt/telescopic steering wheel’s manual adjustments seem out of place in a luxury class
vehicle. Power adjustments would be more in line with buyer expectations.

Service Direct

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A48

THE VANCOUVER COURIER FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011

dashboard

MKZ handles steep hills well, but fuel economy takes a beating
Continued from page 47
THE INSIDE
The dark grey (Bridge of
Weir) leather upholstery
was trimmed with brown
piping. A little different,
but my wife (whom I rely
on in such matters) thought
it was both “bold and stylish.” The front seats also
came with a built-in heating
and cooling feature for both
the seatback and cushion.
And something I’ve absolutely no hesitation endorsing is the optional ($1,000)
THX audio system, a 14-

As you’d expect, the MKZ has iconic Lincoln design cues, including the splitwing grill and the Lincoln star prominent front and back and on the front quarter

speaker surround sound
system that was, in a word,
awesome! On the other
hand, the hybrid’s trunk is
on the small side.
The tilt/telescopic steering
wheel’s manual adjustments
also seemed out of place in
a luxury class vehicle. Power
adjustments would be more
in line with buyer expectations. On a positive note, the
110-volt outlet in the rear of
the centre console is a great
feature and those wood trim
pieces that decorate the cabin ... they are real wood.

THE GENESIS SALES EVENT
LIMITED TIME ONLY

EVERY LUXURY AVAILABLE.
EXCEPT TIME.

THE “L” POSITION’S
FULL REGENERATIVE
BRAKE ... WAS
ENOUGH TO
MAINTAIN A
CONTROLLED
DOWNHILL SPEED
WITH ONLY
OCCASIONAL
BRAKE PEDAL
APPLICATIONS.

4.6L w/ Technology Package model shown

p48 ﬁnal colour

There are a lot of remarkable things about the 2011 Genesis. For one, it’s a stylish and elegant car with

THE OPTIONAL TECHNOLOGY PACKAGE INCLUDES

class-leading standard luxury features. It also comes with a powerful 290 horsepower V6 engine or an
available 385 horsepower V8 engine. An available technology package comes with a host of advanced
technology features, including a Logic 7 Lexicon surround sound system with 17 speakers, navigation with
driver information system, a rear back-up camera display, adaptive cruise control and much more.
The Tau V8 “Ward’s 10 Best Engines.”

SAFETY
In addition to the standard
six airbags in the gas engine
MKZ, the hybrid edition
comes with an extra airbag
for the driver’s knees. Another unique safety feature
is a crash alert system that
activates the hazard warning lights and sounds the
horn if an airbag is deployed
or a seatbelt pretensioner is
activated.
Split-view side mirrors that
provide additional “blind
spot” viewing coverage are
a new standard feature. My
test car came with the optional electronic “blind spot”
warning system.
THE DRIVE
The white and chrome
Lincoln looked completely
at home in the Okanagan. Getting there from the
coast involves scaling the
formidable
high-altitude
(1244m/4,147ft.)
Coquihalla Highway. Not a problem for this hybrid, the MKZ
handled the seemingly endless climb to the summit
with surprising verve. While
fuel economy took a beating
getting to the summit, slipping the shift lever into “L”
uncovered another hybrid
virtue: regenerative brake.

TM
The Hyundai names, logos, product names, feature names, images and slogans are trademarks owned by Hyundai Auto Canada Corp. †Finance offers available O.A.C. from Hyundai Financial Services based on new 2011 Genesis 3.8L models with an annual finance rate of 0% for 84 months.
Monthly payment is $486. No down payment is required. Cost of Borrowing is $0. Finance offer includes Delivery and Destination of $1,760. Levies, registration, insurance, PPSA, license fees and all applicable taxes are excluded. Delivery and destination charge includes freight, P.D.E., dealer
admin fees and a full tank of gas. Financing example: 2011 Genesis Sedan 3.8L with Technology Package for $48,259 at 0% per annum equals $574.51 per month for 84 months for a total obligation of $48,259. Cash price is $48,259. Example price includes Delivery and Destination of $1,760.
Levies, registration, insurance, PPSA, license fees and all applicable taxes are excluded. "Starting price for 2011 Genesis 3.8L is $40,759. Price for model shown: 2011 Genesis 4.6L with Technology Package is $51,759. Delivery and Destination charge of $1,760 included. Levies, registration,
insurance, PPSA, license fees and all applicable taxes are excluded. †"Offers available for a limited time and subject to change or cancellation without notice. See dealer for complete details. Dealer may sell for less. Inventory is limited, dealer order may be required. ∞Ward’s 10 Best Engines
claim is based on the 2010 Genesis 4.6L w/ Technology Package. !385 horsepower only available on 2011 Genesis 4.6L. ††Hyundai’s Comprehensive Limited Warranty coverage covers most vehicle components against defects in workmanship under normal use and maintenance conditions.

The equally steep descent
can chew up and overheat
brakes, as many have discovered. The “L” position’s
full regenerative brake (i.e.
full battery charge/no fuel
use) was enough to maintain
a controlled downhill speed
with only occasional brake
pedal applications. Lower
maintenance cost is another
beneﬁt to hybrid ownership.
I drove at my usual level of
gusto, without making a conscious effort to conserve fuel.
Impressively, fuel economy
still averaged just under 7.0
L/100 km (about 41 mpg).
While touring around the
Kelowna district, its instant
fuel usage readout was signiﬁcantly better, typically
well under 6.0L/100 km
(close to 50 mpg). I had
travelled almost 750 km
Continued next page

A state-of-the-art drive system gives the Lincoln MKZ Hybrid outstanding fuel
economy, but it’s also fun to drive and an excellent touring sedan.

Reinventing Your Auto Experience

Main St.

Continued from page 48
before my ﬁrst stop for fuel and reckon
there was still another 200 km (of driving) in the tank to completely empty.
Hybrid fuel savings are far more dramatic in an urban setting, where it uses
the electric motor more. The MKZ Hybrid
takes it a step further and will startup,
which can be completely silent, and run
for an extended distance, purely on electrical power. The gas engine only kicks in
if you need extra power.
Visuals on the instrument panel also
try to coax you into driving in an ecofriendly fashion. According to Lincoln,
by the time a typical driver earns all ﬁve
of those (digital) ﬂowers, he or she has
saved almost 1,900 litres of gasoline and
two tons of CO2.

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